[TulliusCicero]

I'm not sure a carrier strike group would actually outright lose to a giant swarm of drones, at least in terms of the carrier being sunk. A Shahed warhead is pretty small once you're using it against large warships.

That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night. It feels like the latter strategy would be more effective, saturating air defenses and what have you, but it doesn't seem to be used much. Maybe launching that many drones at roughly the same time is really hard?

[perlgeek]

> at least in terms of the carrier being sunk

You don't need to sink a carrier to make it more of a liability than an asset.

If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.

> That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks

To some degree, this happens. Journalists reporting from Ukraine already talk about some nights being silent, and then there are strikes with 600 drones or so. On the other side, Ukraine was really effective at using naval drone swarms to attack Russian naval ships.

Why not send even bigger swarm? I guess there are limits to how many drones you can effectively control at once. Data links saturate, and you risk losing a big swarm to jamming.

When Russia really wants to destroy a target in Ukraine, they use ballistic missiles, their interception rate is pretty low. Ukraine seems also pretty effective at destroying things in Russia, so air defense doesn't seem to be such a huge obstacle.

Finally, it feels like the Russia-Ukraine war is turning more and more into an economic battle. Ukraine is now at the point where money is more limited than weapons / ammunition, at least for some types of weaponry. Would saving up drones for a huge wave be a big economic advantage?

[CryptoBanker]

> If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.

Both of these statements are wrong. Carriers generally rely on the radar systems of their escorts and their early warning aircraft much more than their own systems.

Similarly, even if the landing deck was damaged, again the carrier's escorts are its primary defense

[AnimalMuppet]

True, but if you can't land planes, then you can only launch each plane once.

But I have a suspicion that the US navy practices damage control and recovery. Repairing a landing deck seems like a thing they would practice very extensively.

[saltcured]

I suppose there is an opportunity cost to saving up all your weapons. What is the enemy doing in that time where you stop throwing things at them?

Otherwise, what stopped them from saving up all the bullets, artillery, or bombs and sending them out in brief pulses in prior wars...

[jjk166]

> "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night.

There are real technical limitations to operating large numbers of drones simultaneously. They are competing with eachother for bandwidth, and the more you squeeze in the weaker they all become to jamming. You need to coordinate larger teams with more resources to operate lots of drones all at once, rather than resupplying smaller teams periodically. Once you have enough drones flying toward a target to survive the defenses, any additional drones are wasted; and for the moment most air defenses are either too expensive or too limited in the number of targets they can simultaneously handle to require large swarms. Smaller numbers of more capable drones can outperform larger numbers of cheaper drones - 1 drone with an 80% chance of neutralizing the target might be cheaper than 2 drones which individually have a 50% chance for a total of 75%; and 2 such drones beat 5 cheap ones. Finally, big attacks are more likely to be detected, either prior to the attack by espionage or while in transit by radar and other sensors - minimizing the time that defenses have to respond or for targets to flee can be much more advantageous than having an extra munition.

All around you want the minimum necessary to get the job done.

[vasco]

I don't think they are fully automated in Ukraine vs Russia. For an onslaught you'd need to either have a lot of pilots, full automation or some in between of like 1 pilot controls one drone but another set of 10 drones fly in formation with the pilot and will self destruct hitting the same target the pilot flew into, but I'm not sure software for this exists yet.

[throwaway27448]

A carrier is nearly impossible to sink. However, a bunch of flaming jet fuel sloshing around a big bathtub with thousands of americans on it is effectively as disastrous.

[nradov]

Ukraine does save up their strike drones. They only launch major strikes on defended targets every week of so. Russia is increasingly running out of air defense systems in many regions.

[wahern]

Russia also does this, with both drones and missiles. It also sends cheap decoys mixed in with the Shaheds, because it turns out they're not as cheap and plentiful as people think, especially when you're trying to hit hard targets.