Comment by carefree-bob
15 hours ago
20,000 drones could hit a carrier and not sink it. 100,000 drones would not sink it. Not if they all landed direct hits. It's like firing a handgun against a tank. You need more oomph.
To sink an aircraft carrier you really need like 10 direct hits with hypersonic missiles. Or a couple of hits with a torpedo. If you are lucky, maybe even a single torpedo hit. People underestimate how hard it is to sink a ship. You really have to attack it below the water line, from the bottom. A single torpedo is more effective than 100,000 drones when it comes to sinking big ships.
What drones could do, is damage the runway and radars and other equipment that would constitute a "mission kill" -- e.g. the carrier has to withdraw for a period to fix the damage to equipment on deck.
But now think a little bit -- the drones have limited range. They have to be launched from somewhere. So just launch missiles from that location. You get the same thing -- a mission kill. You don't need a million drones. And the missile will have much larger range than the drones, and will cause more damage.
So the bottom line of all of this is no US aircraft carrier would venture near Chinese shores in the event of a war with china. That is probably because those shores would be lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway, as would ours. So what do you need the drones for?
I think you're imagining 'drones' as 'small quadcopters with hand grenades' as deployed in Ukraine. To be sure even a large swarm of these would struggle against an aircraft carrier, but you need to also consider things like Shahed drones that can carry 1-200kg of munitions and are much cheaper than missiles. Depending on where a conflict takes place, I can see a large number of small disposable drones being used to overwhelm targeting systems while a moderate number of medium drones with a serious payload carry out the actual attack.
Also, while you're completely right about the ruggedness of the ship itself, image recognition electronics are dirt cheap nowadays. You can buy COTS camera-IR modules from under $100 and train them on whatever you want. If I were opposing an enemy that had carriers while I had only drones, I'd target specific parts of the superstructure rather tha the hull.
lightning up with mushroom clouds anyway
I think you are wildly overestimating the appetite for using tactical nuclear weapons. Whoever deploys those first in an offensive capacity is going to gain instant pariah status. The US is torching a lot of its traditional alliances as is, deploying a nuclear weapon in anger would result in international criminal status and probable internal collapse soon after. nor do I see any likelihood of China using them against Taiwan since that would undermine the entire purpose of a military undertaking.
As you stated, there would be no need to sink the carrier to remove it from service. Heck you don't even have to damage the carrier at all if you damage enough of its fleet. Sufficient damage to the tarmac of the carrier, the bridge, radars, weapon systems, and communications of a sufficient portion of the ships of the carrier group would remove it from service, for a very long time, especially if American/Korean/Japanese ports and dry-docks were also damaged by container ships already docked in/near those facilities (likely too close for our current missile defense systems to defend against).
Missiles are also an option, though carrier groups have some ability to defend themselves against them (less capability against hypersonic missiles, of course). The Chinese container ships are reported to have up to 60 vertical launch systems, which may be insufficient to overwhelm a carrier group and remove the carrier from service. It's reported that carrier groups can defend against "dozens to 100+" missiles.
That's why I'd imagine that it might be easier for a single container ship to disable a carrier group using 10,000+ drones instead of 60+ missiles. Especially as you wouldn't need fiber-optic cables, against ships a COTS AI targeting system would be sufficient (still robust against jamming, but allows for longer range than fiber-optics would).
nothing would prevent putting a nuke on the drone, and making a it a tactical nuke delivery system. you can have them as big or small as you want, and in air, on the surface, or under the water.
you are applying arbitrary constraints to a thing thats just "put an rc controller on it"
ukrainian drones are doing something like 700 miles to hit the oil ports in primorsk. its not the 2500 miles that a missile might do for hitting diego garcia, but nothing says you could get one to. after all, a b2 bomber can go on long flights. put controller on it, and control it via a satellite, and the b2 becomes a drone
You do realize that underwater drones exist and have been successfully used against Russian ships, right?
In the navy they call long-range underwater drones a "torpedo". It has been assumed to be a primary threat against ships for a century. Modern navies have many systems purpose-built to deal with that threat.
Plus these things have a range of about 50 miles. It's not like if you are a carrier floating in the pacific, you will be swarmed with a thousand torpedoes. To launch one requires a submarine, and while one may hide, it's not so easy to penetrate the defenses of a carrier group in the middle of the pacific.
Ukraine has had success against mostly unarmored and a few lightly armored Russian ships (and let's face it, these are small ships compared to carriers) in the black sea because the front lines are there and they can launch from a port, travel 5 miles, and hit one of these ships. That's a completely different situation.
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That's like equating a cruise missile with an aerial drone (which is nonsensical).
Now I'm not saying defense against UUVs is impossible, but plenty of defenses against torpedoes don't work against them.
Note also that part of the approach of drone warfare is sheer quantity. Stopping 1 may be trivial, stopping 5 may be doable, but stopping 20 simultaneous ones might already be too hard to do consistently and repeatedly.
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