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Comment by cwillu

5 hours ago

“Drone” covers many orders of magnitude in capability, but a CIWS can handle functionally unlimited numbers of the low-end, and the high-end don't clearly win the cost-per-kill war.

Drones are game changing on land because they allow smart munitions to be usefully spread across an entire country, far outpacing a defender's ability to deploy air defenses. But a carrier battle group doesn't have this problem: the defenses are necessarily already positioned on and around the thing being defended.

Where the cost balance starts becoming relevant is when destroyers are trying to defend other vessels: something that could be easily shot down by a CIWS at the target might require an SM-1 if the Standard is coming from 100km away from the target vessel.