The U.S. Naval Institute has their own proposals.[1]
Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working. The Moskva was sunk by a missile mounted on a truck. That was a wake-up call for the world's navies. China has a lot of anti-ship missiles mounted on trucks. Any naval ship in range of a hostile shore is in trouble today. The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection.
It's also a big setback for the MAGTF concept, where a Marine unit is based from a group of medium-sized helicopter carriers and boat carriers. Those craft sit offshore and send out boats and helicopters. This works great against minor enemies with no air power. Against ones that can shoot ship-sinking missiles, or swarms of drones, it's not a good strategy. Houthi drones have become a serious threat. Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones. Running out of missiles has become a serious problem. Underway replenishment of vertical launch tubes at sea is difficult, which means ships may have to return to a base to reload.
The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more. If it flies, it will be shot at. No more flying helicopters over the battlefield with impunity. On the ground, nobody can move in the open. Tanks are easy to kill for anyone with the right weapons. Ukraine has turned into a war of attrition, where both sides keep steadily killing troops without accomplishing much. The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last.
All those problems are coming to naval warfare.
> The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last.
This is true for any military conflict and always has been. It's basically a game of resource denial/destruction.
If you poke through all the propaganda, ideology, etc. most wars boil down to which side has the best economics and can best deny access to essential resources for the other side in order to gain access to resources the other side controls (oil, minerals, land, water ways, trade routes, etc.).
Many modern conflicts are actually proxy wars where large countries subsidize minor conflicts in a plausibly deniable but otherwise very open way. China, the US, EU, Russia, the Saudi's, etc. are all parties in such conflicts and they are fighting against each other and with each other depending on where you look (Middle East, Africa, South America, etc.). In the background you have trade relation ships, oil & minerals, and economical sanctions. And in some parts of the world water access. Those are the resources that sustain conflicts.
Modern weaponry changes the tactics. But the strategy is always the same: go after resource access and you might win. You can see that happening in Ukraine and if China goes there, it will be a factor in Taiwan. It's why they mainly talk about that without going there. China is much smarter than Russia on this.
Outside of the initial stages of the conflicts this is usually. One of the most interesting facts of the Rhodesian Bush war was they only really gave up when the fuel refinery and depot was destroyed.
> The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more.
This might be correct but I don't think the Ukraine war is demonstrative because neither side had the capability to establish air superiority.
Just two days ago: "F-35 Had To Maneuver To Evade Houthi Surface-To-Air Missile", "Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses" [1]
They also shot down seven MQ-9 drones [2].
I don't know how close Houthis were to actually shoot down that F-35 (probably not that close). But if their Iranian SAMs can threaten F-35s, what can state of the art Chinese or Russian systems do? Could NATO even establish air superiority in Ukraine?
[1] https://www.twz.com/air/f-35-had-to-maneuver-to-evade-houthi...
[2] https://www.twz.com/u-s-mq-9-drone-shot-down-by-iranian-back...
Losing air assess is a given. Package Q alone lost two F-16s. We lost an F-117 in Bosnia. But run enough Wild Weasel and eventually we did establish air superiority.
In Ukraine there is no establishing superiority without occupying Russian territory.
I used to draw mushroom clouds against hills in the 80s. I do not want to see NATO in Russia. I only want Russia out of Ukraine.
US isn’t deploying its best SEAD tech against Houthis either, though.
I don’t disagree with the general discussion; but it’s worth remembering the US would also change tactics against Russia or China.
I don't disagree with what you are saying, and tactics also evolve a lot during conflicts.
But my point is that the actual effectiveness of US forces against top-tier Russian or Chinese integrated air defense systems is unknown. And getting more unknown by the day rather than less.
I would say though that we can probably look at the Ukraine war and understand how their air defense systems are working. And the answer to that seems to be: not as well as previously assumed, they do work but have been vulnerable. This is mainly the S300 and S400. I couldn't find much about the newest system, Russia isn't able to do much manufacturing of the most complex weapons at the moment. If I had a guess, based on what we've seen in Ukraine, US forces would shred the Russians in the air and water, but ground forces would be far behind when it came to drone warfare. I'm just a chump sitting at home though so...
China is a whole other story and honestly I'm ok never finding out that answer.
That isn't all that new, HMS Glamorgan was hit by a missile mounted on a truck in 1982 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glamorgan_(D19)#Falklands_...
> Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones.
When will we have cheap drones that can take out other cheap drones?
They have been demonstrated already. Lasers for small/medium drones are already being tested live in conflict regions as well.
We are only a few years in to the state change. Militaries take time and the big ones are learning cost lessons right now.
There is a significant asymmetry in the requirements: cheap attack drones only have to succeed once, cheap defense drones have to succeed every time (or intercept sufficiently far out that some more reliable backup can be deployed when they fail).
But the same is true of expensive missiles, which are apparently what's used now.
Seems like having a magazine of 1000 defense drones would be a good addition to a ship already armed with anti-aircraft missiles, so you don't have to shoot a missile unless you really have to. It would level out the economics.
The difficulty is choosing to fire a lower probability of kill weapon while defending a high-value asset (the ship) during a limited window of engagement.
By definition, cheaper interceptors are shorter range, which means you have less time for a Plan B if it fails.
The historical solution was to push air defense pickets farther out around high-value ships, but the US hasn't had anything affordable in that class since the Perries referenced in the article.
Aka, if you have an SM-2 or ESSM to fire to defend an Arleigh Burke+ at maximum range... you're going to fire it.
I don’t think it’s even theoretically possible to defend an aircraft carrier sized target against a sufficiently concentrated missile/drone attack within say a 5 minute window 200 km offshore.
Even if we assume absurdities like quadrupling the number of reactors, 100% efficient lasers, a dozen escort ships also with their own lasers, etc…
I expect that's a big part of the SEWIP Block III upgrade: high-power EWAR being seen as the most effective current point defense against swarms.
Presumably you can pump enough energy through naval AESAs to do bad things to drones and cruise missiles, and they have the advantage of being electronically steerable and volumetrically targeted.
https://www.twz.com/41829/this-is-what-the-navys-new-shipboa...
I think the point is that the ship is itself an expensive and vulnerable method of delivering drones to a target (because warfare has become all about delivering more drones to the target than the other guy can cope with).
If you deployed 100 patrol boats, each with 100 drones and no missiles, that is a cheaper, more efficient, more resilient solution that one ship with 1000 drones and a bunch of missiles.
Define drones. Define missiles. How big are these drones? Are they group 1? Group 3[0]? Can this ship with missiles use its group 4 drones to find and fix these patrol boats so it can toss missiles at the opposing patrol boats? Can the patrol boats do anything about the missiles incoming at M3? Can I use some group 4 drones to drop a bunch of group 1 drones in the vicinity of those patrol boats, where they have no response because they don’t have medium anti-air capability?
Vulnerable does not mean obsolete.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAS_groups_of_the_United_State...
Patrol boats are fine for low intensity coastal security missions but mostly useless in any high intensity conflict. They can't operate effectively far from shore. And close to shore you might as well use land based aircraft and missiles.
Not drones, high-power lasers. The US has been testing laser weapons for terminal defense extensively, with quite a bit of success. A laser shot has about the same cost as a single 20mm cartridge and you don’t need to reload.
That may work, but the enemy might attack with a thousand drones at once. So far, laser mounts are one per ship, and need several seconds on target to take down a drone.
This drone video is seven years old.[1] It's a hobbyist jet aircraft. 415 mph top speed. You have to expect that by now there are militarized versions.
A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive. Even the crappy non-survivable drones used in Ukraine are tens of thousands of dollars and that would probably tip north of $100k each if they actually had to be hardened against modern countermeasures, which aren't really a thing in Ukraine. Aside from the cost issue, launching thousands of them against a single naval target is unlikely to be feasible due to the weight and volume considerations alone. The largest drone attacks ever mustered across an entire theater of war, never mind against a single target, were in the hundreds and those didn't have to contend with much in the way of serious broad spectrum countermeasures or point defenses.
You would likely be better off with several actual anti-ship missiles. A Harpoon only costs $1.4M and those are dedicated platforms purpose-built to defeat state-of-the-art defenses and countermeasures.
The US Navy is testing the lasers against cruise missiles and other systems with much more protection and capability than the typical cheap drone. Current versions are lower-power testbeds but production versions are expected to be several hundred kW.
> A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive.
Not any more.
DJI drone able to return home using visual navigation without GPS.[1] Unarmed. About US$1000.
Small lightning-proof drone.[2] Aims lightning strikes. Cost not given.
Ukraine EW-resistant drone.[3] Drops bombs. Currently about US$30,000.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM
[2] https://dronexl.co/ja/2025/04/23/ntt-lightning-triggering-dr...
[3] https://interestingengineering.com/military/meet-the-shoolik...
None of these are applicable to the naval context here. That $30k drone has a measly 10km range. You can't navigate visually on the open ocean. The payload requirements are at least 100kg if you want to do any damage, which none of these come close to. None of them can withstand modern military countermeasures; the "EW resistance" in this case just means operating in a denied environment, which is pretty old and basic tech.
Completely different class of drone capability. Something that could actually do damage in a naval context against modern countermeasure tech would be much more expensive.
I literally had this exact same discussion here about 3 years ago when people were scoffing about the idea that tanks would become unusable archaic white elephants because they're vulnerable to drones.
At the moment, yes, if you want to field a drone that can kill a ship then it's going to be expensive. But we haven't seen any real development of ship-killing drones because the Ukraine conflict is land-based with only limited naval conflict.
Military doctrine only really advances during wartime, by people in the field desperately trying new things to survive. If we had a naval war you'd very quickly see new advances in all this tech and I think you'd very quickly end up in the same situation; that large ships become useless archaic white elephants because they're vulnerable to drones.
> That $30k drone has a measly 10km range.
You don't necessarily need a lot of range if you launch them from a small drone vessel[1].
Ok. Flying drones that we've seen in Ukraine lack the range to survive a naval deployment.
Ukraine has had some success engaging Russian surface warships with small aquatic craft type drones.
Does a ground-based operator pose a threat to modern navies by means of some swarm of jet-ski robots?
Yes, but only in the littorals or protected waters. Small unmanned surface vessels can't really operate effectively out in the open ocean. They lack the necessary sensors, endurance, and sea keeping ability.
for now
What does that even mean? There isn't any magic technology on the horizon which will allow small USVs to operate effectively in blue water.
How much does a swarm of extremely long range jet ski robots with hardened military electronics and large explosives packages cost?
Getting enough of anything that can do serious damage to a ship to overwhelm the defenses is going to be an expensive undertaking. Maybe if some idiot sails a $10 billion aircraft carrier close to shore such a mass attack is justified, but it is simply not at all evident that "some success engaging Russian surface warships" equates to posing a serious threat to modern navies.
Also EMPs and microwaves to fry swarms of drones at once.
What EMPs? This is the real world, not some sci-fi movie. Due to the inverse square law, generating an EMP powerful enough to act as a weapon takes an extremely powerful explosion.
I think they were conflating EMP with directed RF weapons. The latter is a standard feature set for anything with a beam steering transmitter. Those can dump a lot of focused RF energy on a targets. That has been an automated defense response since the mid-20th century and would likely kill most drones.
EMP is, of course, extremely inefficient no matter how you pump it.
You wouldn't want your EMP devices to have the range to go from your position to enemy object, you would mostly be fucking all your stuff up. What you would want to do is lob an EMP device at the enemy object, and detonate it as close as possible. Not only does it minimize damage to your own equipment, you need a MUCH smaller device. And it can be done without a ton of effort with a fast explosive, a neodymium magnet, and some copper wire to blast the magnet through, potentially launched mortar style.
I think the only reason we don't see more EMP devices is because it will screw up all your communications and potentially other equipment too, and piss off every other country within 1,000 miles with all the EM noise. You can't really protect your radios equipment from EMP devices other than to coordinate taking them all down and shielding them all. It could also potentially be a prelude to nuclear EMPs and thus nuclear war but im not all that sure what a countries response would be to EMP weapons and attacks.
You can want those things, but outside of nuclear weapons they don't actually exist. Practical and effective conventional (non-nuclear) EMP weapons remain in the sci-fi realm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...
Also I don't want them, nmobody wants them. They will mess up all your own stuff just as good as the enemies and piss off the entire world with the EM noise.
Yes, I am aware of those experiments. They are not really effective because the pulse range is miniscule. So you're not making any sense.
EMP weapons are directional, and thus aren't affected by the inverse square law. Further, the power that a ship can output can exceed what a drone could tolerate by many orders of magnitude. EMP weapons do not require an explosion.
You appear to be referring to some sort of jammer or directed energy weapon, not an "EMP" as the term is usually defined.
You can direct an EMP so it’s close to linear losses — the difference between a laser and a lightbulb.
You won't, because that necessitates a faster drone that your adversary might already be fielding.
This is incorrect. You have layered responses. Faster drones mean less range, speed, or payload. So you layer your defense response to account for the different categories.
This won’t be a game of mine is better faster like marketing pukes like to pretend. Just like memory caches one size does not solve all problems.
Missiles, small kinetic drone interceptors, AA guns, lasers, shotgun drones, gps spoofing, jammers, and high power microwaves just to name some options. Each has its place and saying drone interceptors won’t work shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
We're talking about surface vessels, here. What layer can a drone even occupy? Close-in intercepts are handled with CIWS systems, BMD is covered by VLS, AA handled by SAMs. Drones do not handle any of those mission profiles better than their counterparts, cost be damned.
I'm entirely willing to write off drone interceptors for the foreseeable future. Layered defense certainly presents opportunities, but not for low-reliability expendable doodads.
a.k.a... cheap missiles. They don't even need to have a payload, they just need to hit the enemy drones before they get to close.
Only when we're forced. There's an ego problem with military acquisitions, people want big fancy things. When million dollar missiles are outmatched with thousand dollar drones and that becomes an actual threat is when these things change. Ukraine is working as a reality check and learning experience for what modern war would actually be like on a large scale.
This, agree completely.
History is rhyming with the WW1 generals who viewed machine guns as an irrelevant distraction from the main job of getting the cavalry charging.
It's fascinating seeing the nature of warfare literally changing before our eyes in Ukraine and still everyone's focused on building big beautiful weapons
Wasn't the Moskva caught sitting there with its defence radars switched off? I think that was a big fumble by the Russian navy but not necessarily reflective of any fundamental shift in the broader landscape of ships vs missiles.
I don't see any USNI articles that echo your comment, so idk why you linked them as a source...
I think it's been obvious for quite a while that in a real war ships are now going to be pretty useless as they're far too vulnerable to cheap and easy weapons. The Houthis demonstrated this to folks who weren't aware or in denial, but it's been true for a while.
> Houthis demonstrated this
The Houthis have sunk 2 civilian ships, out of 30 damaged.
It's hard to sink a ship.
It's even harder to sink a military ship in prepared condition with a crew trained in damage control.
The USS Cole was reportedly hit with 1,000 lbs of C4 against the hull [0], while presumably not at battle stations, yet still managed to stay afloat.
Watch some of the sinkex's for what it takes to send a ship to the bottom (read: heavyweight torpedo). There's a reason they usually burn before they sink.
Holes full of air tend not to do a good job of sinking ships. Holes full of water are good at sinking ships. Small warheads aren’t going to be effective at making holes full of water. They may be good at blowing up stuff on top, that make the ship not useful for doing it’s mission though.
$1000 drones laden with explosives aiming for just above the waterline would seem to put holes in appropriately dangerous places.
You could launch a thousand of them for the cost of a single anti ship missile.
A reasonable thing to do in a modern war would be to launch 10,000 drones all at once at an aircraft carrier, even at a very low success rate that's a lot of little holes.
Just ask yourself how many you're going to need and what defense exists for them currently.
Shitty self-guided weapons can be made very easily these days and in tremendously large numbers. The defense industry focus is presently on very advanced things that it seems could trivially be overwhelmed by volume.
Double layer hulls? Compartmentalization? 1-8" thick steel plate?
When something floats, there are fewer restrictions on weight. CV-66 took a lot of direct explosions before going to the bottom.
The easiest way to think of modern carriers is ships inside ships, such that the entire thing stays buoyant even if most of the outside compartments are compromised.
Navies have been building steel ships for a minute... and are pretty good at it.
Welcome to the jeune ecole. The problem of $1000 drones is range and speed. A carrier is moving at 20kt, regularly. More if conducting flight operations. $1k drones are group 1 drones in DoD classification. There are limited in speed and range. If they teleported into range of the carrier, sure, they could reach it, and keep up with it. But if they don’t start near the carrier, how close do they need to start to do so?
To get holes at the water line, you’re going to have to take your drone down to the water line. Which means you’re going to have to deal with the waves and spray from being down there. Cheap drones are not notable for dealing well with hitting the water.
Beyond the thick steel plating, and compartmentalization, there’s also the fact that little holes just won’t let in much water. If you want to sink a ship, you need to let in more water than the pumps can take out.
If you start talking about $50k drones, then a bunch of these objections start changing. You can get much more range, much more speed, much larger warheads, and much greater capabilities in general. But your cost curve has changed a bunch, so you get 200 drones instead of 10k drones for a given amount of cash.
And at some point of additional requirements, you've come full circle back to the low-cost, rapid-production cruise missiles that most militaries (including the US) have been developing for the last 5 or so years.
Vulnerable is not the same as obsolete.
Surface ships are still the only way to transport large quantities of troops and equipment over long distances. If you want to maintain the ability to project force beyond oceans, you need a navy to escort the vulnerable transport ships and to fight whatever threats they would be facing.
The Houthis haven't actually managed to hit any warships. In fact the opposite of what you claim has been demonstrated. The defenses work well, although at great expense.
Of course whether they can survive a determined attack from a near-peer adversary remains to be seen.
You grossly underestimate how hard it is to sink a warship. During SINKEX live fire exercises that use a retired US Navy ship as a target, they will usually absorb many hits with state-of-the-art weapons without sinking, even though the active defenses are turned off. This is several thousand kilograms of explosive with terminal guidance smart enough to find the most vulnerable part of the ship.
Typically, they have to send a specialized demolition team to actually sink the ship after the exercise is over.
To a first approximation, US Navy ships are demonstrably unsinkable. That has always been a hallmark of US Naval architecture, and they are rightly proud of it. The idea that it is possible to destroy these ships with tens of kilos of explosives delivered by cheap drones isn’t serious.
> The Moskva
Crew of 500 and one helicopter.
> The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection.
Crew of 10,000 plus an entire airwing.
> The Ukraine war
A "war" in which civilian casualties are intentionally limited. This serves as a very limited example of what modern full out war would entail.
One major thing that's missing from this analysis is the rise of cheap mobile laser defense systems that can stop these missiles/drones pretty quickly. If the weather isn't ideal for lasers a ship can just move out of range.
Ukraine drones aren't even submersible with attention to stealth afaik.
The navy is going to be, uh, already is a totally different battlefield.
Even deep water flotillas maybe maybe vulnerable to extremely low-tech long loitering naval drones. If you want to defend against us carrier groups, do you build your own carrier group or design a long loiter submersible activatable drone that you can build insufficient numbers to basically cover your the entire strategic theater of the ocean that you need.
How much is a full carrier group or a sufficient Navy to fight them, $100 billion?
Drunks are simply going to make power projection a lot more difficult outside of strategic nuclear weapons. If Taiwan is on the ball, they should have thousands if not more anti-ship drones ready to be launched. The second they see invasion operations by mainland China crossing the channel.
I do disagree with air power: I believe there is substantial air power superiority now and in the medium term future with advanced high altitude high-speed Jets. That still requires a huge amount of engineering investment and technological infrastructure to compete in that theater, and dominance of that provides vast tactical advantages.
And, despite how much I hate musk, if the starship SpaceX rocket achieved some measure of its payload and launch goals it enables military dominance of low orbit for a couple decades.
Forget long range drones, the Chinese have worked on a ballistic anti-ship missile (DF-21D) that can credibly threaten or destroy a carrier from 1000 miles/1600km away. It uses a conventional warhead and would limit carrier operations. Or at the very least, would make the US Navy think very hard about the risk/reward ratio of deploying a carrier group.
"and would limit carrier operations"
Do you have any idea how small a carrier is when you are hypersonic at, say, 100,000 feet above sea level? And the bloody thing is moving too.
Color me skeptical. That missile has to be actively guided in using external systems. The US has extensive defenses in-depth designed to defeat systems that work this way. The Soviets were doing it long before the Chinese were. It is a threat but I don't think the US Navy is losing sleep over it. The US deprecated systems with similar guidance models a long time ago because of their intrinsic vulnerability to defenses.
Also, it can't credibly "destroy" a carrier. The warhead is much too small. You could launch dozens, at high cost, but this is where the attackable single point of failure of these missiles start to become a problem.
Naval mines that launch torpedoes have already been a thing for decades so you're not suggesting anything new. But not even China can afford to build enough of those to achieve a useful level of protection. The ocean is big. Look at a map sometime.
> Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working.
Nothing new there. Attacking ships from shore worked fine in WWII. (And in dozens of wars, over multiple centuries, before that.) Operationally, the drones and anti-ship missiles look very similar to WWII Axis shore-defense batteries and air forces. The latter included both kamikazes and stuff like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X - both of which knocked out multiple Allied capital ships. Major Allied air and naval forces could spend month wearing shore-based defense down, in preparation for amphibious invasions.