- Houthi rebels are threatening US warships and shipping using naval drones, a new report said.
- The commander of a US Navy carrier strike group says these weapons are among the more frightening.
- The use of cheap sea drones has been pioneered, to considerable success, by Ukraine.
I think there is a meta-narrative forming around how utterly useless all of the millitary industrial complexes’ think tanks and talking heads have been about predicting the future of warfare.
Trillions of dollars wasted pointing in a wrong direction because a $350 3d printed drones with walmart grade parts is more effective than a decades long program costing billions of dollars and equipment costing in the hundreds of thousands to millions. All of which is kind-of like a ‘well duh’ realization. The future of war is fully asymetric and the utility of these very very very expensive programs is dubious.
On the other hand you have the f35, and its like, well maybe there is some strategic validity to this spending approach.
It seems like a bifurcation, where you can have highly effective, very low cost gear, or highly effective, very high cost gear, but there is this massive valley between the two approaches from a development perspective, where everything in the middle is kind of a waste of time. It would seem to me that in the low cost approach, iteration is stupid cheap, so even if it isn’t effective in the long term, its effective enough in the short term to make it almost impossible for the high cost approach to be responsive.
Like there is just no way a modern Navy can be cost competitive with whats possible using basic, off the shelf, distributed development and manufacturing tech. If a couple of remote control boats with explosives strapped to them are capable of this, it brings into question the value of a carrier strike group, when for the cost of a carrier strike group, you could build a basically infinite supply of lower cost drones.
The carrier strike group still has its planes and sensors and so on. Drones are more like upgraded missiles. Powerful missiles made ships vulnerable, but they didn’t obsolete navies.
the point is largely about the price to performance of these equipment.
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The big picture challenge to this view is that for a couple of hundred dollars or even thousand dollars, a Houthi rebel group can go challenge a strike group. If it only takes one drone to reach its target, the Houthis can deploy 10, 20 ,100? all at once. A 50 caliber round can penetrate the waters surface, but are basically ineffective after 10-20 feet of water. Then how do you go after something you have no underwater answer for? Even on the waters surface these would be incredibly hard to track, below the waters surface, in the chop, there is no way you are tracking those targets. And even then, what do you respond to them with?
What use is enough fire power to vaporize a nation when barely enough firepower to vaporize a starbucks can shut it down? This is asymmetry of power on display. Strike groups work against an equally powered and technically capable force with the same standards around whats acceptable or not regarding tech. Strike groups are appearing very weak against much poorly equipped, less technically capable forces who don’t have the same standards or limitations around their strategic thinking.
Strike groups are incredibly costly to build, crew, maintain. If you can stop one with a couple 3d printers, some alibaba grade parts, and some grit, ingenuity, and willingness to do things differently… Who is going to be more successful in that conflict?
The military industrial complex we’ve been told we should rely on to provide these answers is built around spending billions to come up with solutions to what the future of warfare will look like. Their answers are very expensive, single solution products, because that is what makes their industry the most money. But its emerging that there is an alternative way to approach these problems. Simple quad copters with an xbox controller and a head, a small quantity of C4 explosive might only be 1/20th as effective as a predator drone. But if its 1/1000th the cost?
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Well which is it? Are they there to vaporize an island or are they for show?
First off, you are trivializing your opponent, which is always a symptom of a losing strategy. Second, we treated the Afghanis’ as petty barbarians in caves… and we basically lost that war. We got nothing for it, held no permanent territory, have no long term strategic partners developed as a result, and burned a cool couple trillion in the process. Thats neat thing about lower tech asymmetric engagement. If you vaporize one island, another 3d printer, and parts from Alibaba are just a couple grand and an amazon prime shipment away. Increasing the amount of force you use against it does basically nothing. Can it project force thousands of miles away? No, but its not intending to do so. The asymmetric low tech approach is for dealing with occupying forces, and the modern military industrial complex approach has no answer for it.
How long before we lose a vessel? A week? A month? A year?
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So whats the plan then? Can the US just no longer go anywhere with pirates? The fuck do you think they’re going to do?
If any one with a 3d printer or 2 day shipping can stop a carrier group, what good are carrier groups? Ukraine just took out a modern vessel with a drone thats at least a ROM equivalent of what the Houthis are using. My whole point is that through the advising of the millitary industrial complex, the US and other nationstates are pot-commited to a weapons strategy that appears to be well countered by an asymmetric approach.
What good is a strike group if a couple pirates cans top them or prevent them projecting force?
Underwater drone is just a fancy name for torpedo.
An underwater drone in the same class as a Mark-48, not even remotely close.
A single Mark-48 costs around 6 million dollars. One. Only one. You can’t fire it without a billion dollar submarine or anti-sub surface vessel, and crews to crew to man them.
How many underwater drones can you make for that price? Say its 5k for an extremely high quality one? One that can carry enough charge to put a hole in air craft carrier? You get 1200 underwater drones for the price of one Mark48. Which is exactly the point I’m making.
Asymmetry wins and the military industrial complex has fundamentally misunderstood what the future of warfare would look like. The multi decade process that countries like the US take to get a weapon like the f35 from concept to deployment simply can not content with much more basic, cheaper, less mission critical iteration that this asymmetric scaling allows for.
The carriers are designed to survive actual torpedos.( Mk 48 wahead: 650 lbs of military explosives)
It would take many drones to breech.
And yes, the capital acquisition cycle is multi decade but the upgrade programs are more responsive.
These threats are not unlike previously seen threats.
That’s a fair stance to take. Its not one I agree with, but its a fine stance. We are seeing vessels being lost, vessels from a roughly equivalent scale nation state, with at least on paper a roughly equivalent development program, not to 6 million dollar, but to much much cheaper and easier to deploy equipment. I’m not saying its a coffin nail to traditional approaches to these kinds of programs, but at least in one case, the only one we have data for, asymmetry seems to be working.
And my point is that the purpose of a carrier strike group isn’t just to blow enemy ships up. Subs and missile are already much better at that and we haven’t replaced our entire navy with them.
Interesting. However, aren’t you comparing short range defensive systems to global force projection?
Also: give militaries a bit of time to react. They will adapt to develop more amd better anti drone defenses.
Our air force projected inventory is made to be able to control airspace pretty far away. I wish I remembered the white paper I read, but the goal is to be able to fuck militaries up far from home.
So long as we’re not trying to occupy it shouldn’t be too bad.
I think war will change somewhat with drones, and military hacking will become much more important to disable or even recruit drones over to another side. But unfortunately, I don’t think drones will ever capture cities without infantry, and the advent and proliferation of DE (laser) weapons could largely make open areas into simple hitscan battles, grounding cheap and expensive drones alike. Similar story for sea drones once we figure out DE aerial weapons.
Anyways, I expect automated direct energy weapons to largely change the calculus of war again, sooner rather than later. I pray we figure it out for nuclear shield technologies soon, since firing rockets at high-speed ICBMs or hypersonic rockets doesn’t seem too practical, dollar for dollar, or for 100% reliability from nukes.
The exact things you are citing here are what I am claiming are the precise kinds of misthinking that I think the military industrial research and consulting complex has built their carreers and brands on, and exactly what I’m saying have shown themselves to be largely ineffective in the face of a distributed low cost/ low risk/ high turnover/ high capacity force.
DE is a great example of this kind of tautology of high technology in action. This link goes to a very recent congressional report on DE. Lets just suggest that they make the 500 kW targets claimed, or that those targets have already been achieved, for the sake of illustration. The Tesla Megapack 2 has a capacity of 3.854 MWh and can support a load of 1.927 MW (1927 Kilowatt). It weighs 67,200 lb (30,500 kg). So hypothetically a Tesla Megapack 2 could support up to four beams simultaneously, and for a duration up to two hours. So we’ll call that 8 beam hours. Lets say it takes 30 beam seconds to engage an unarmored target (the beam needs to be sustained long enough to cause damage, it has to happen at range, so there are stabilization requirements). A system like this is going to several million per unit. They are going to be very big, heavy and slow moving. They’ll need to be basically almost perfectly stable while the laser is firing.
Here is an recent video on the destructiveness of DE. . Here is a link to the unit in the video. The optics probably cost another 1k. You can drive it on 2 phase.
Your points reflect that exact thinking, so thank you for allowing the justopostion. In this context, unless you can scale down DE weaponry to something that can be 3d printed, drone mounted, is basically disposable, and costs less than 3k to make including labor, its probably a waste of time in the context of modern warfare. Its the thinking that high-technology is a panacea, when actually, cheap, easily produced, modular tools are orders of magnitude more effective per dollar.
The broader point I’m making is that the military industrial complex has misunderstood the future of where warfare will go because it is and has been more profitable to do so.
Fair point, thank you.
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Here is an recent video on the destructiveness of DE.
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