alt Hacker NewsThe US not going full in on drones reminds me of the British ridiculing submarines.
The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...
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But we are making a fuckton of them.....
I don't know if you've looked recently, but the pacific is, likev pretty big. Maybe even bigger than that.
The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1]
Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb.
It's also considerably harder to hide things like drones in big empty spaces.
If loitering drones became a serious threat (as opposed to the, you know, literally super sonic missiles the navy has spent the last 40 years planning for) itms pretty easy to imagine anti-drone planes/ships/drones sweeping a large radius around your carriers.
[1] Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction. Also if someone was actually using satellites to target american carriers with munitions the americans would probably just destroy the satellites.
Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage. Yes, they are effective at hunting infantry, but you can't reach across an ocean and strike the US with "millions of drones".
Relatedly, aircraft carriers are great for beating up on small powers, but they are vulnerable and would not be effective at reaching across the ocean and bombing China.
Plus, both nations have nukes, so the idea of either China or the US "winning" a war against the other side is easily cancelled out.
What you are left with, is a lot of posturing about superpower wars which is a waste of time. All sort of people thumping their chest, wargaming things out, as if any of this nonsense isn't immediately squashed with the nuclear trump card.
There will be no superpower wars.
There will, however, continue to be wars against smaller states, and the F35, aircraft carriers, etc, are really effective at those kinds of things. That is, effective at waging the wars that will actually happen. Nukes and the pacific ocean stop any war of consequence against China.