alt Hacker NewsWhether or not professional military strategists and planners anticipated this shift in carrier-based projection of power in the era of low-cost drones, it is nearly certain that the Commander-in-Chief of the United States military has not. And if the Commander is involved in the either the day-to-day operations or the strategic level of planning, I can’t imagine that whatever reasoning about these shifts in power dynamics has taken place will influence U.S. operations.
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> this shift in carrier-based projection of power in the era of low-cost drones
Nothing in this war has suggested carriers are obsolete. A carrier that launches drones and fields an anti-drone strike group would be amazing. We don’t have that. (And even what we do have is great in the carrier department, it’s given us air parity to superiority from way offshore.)
The article is reflecting on the observed reality that US Navy operations in this war are taking Iran’s littoral combat power into account by operating its ships further from the Iranian coast…why can’t you imagine that they are operating this way under Trump?
An aerial drone capable of materially damaging a modern navy ship costs $1-2M a piece. Anything much cheaper doesn't have the range, survivability, or required warhead to do much more than scratch the paint.
A cheap drone is only useful against soft targets. It is the reason Ukraine is scaling up heavy cruise missile production even though they already have vast numbers of cheap long-range drones. Being "cheap" isn't of much value if it is incapable of doing meaningful damage to the desired target.
The US has been designing and building thousands of anti-ship drones since the 1970s. It isn't like they have no experience with the concept and those drones are far more capable than anything Iran has. The US Navy has assumed drone swarms as a threat model for half a century.