Naturally this means drones, but the give and take in this debate on the X-thread – XCancel allows non X account holders to see a lengthy thread – shows that it’s not as one-sided as some people claim in considering drones vs the current Big Toys of the military, from bombers to tanks to aircraft carriers, although in this debate the focus is naval.

I strongly urge you to read the whole thing, but I’ll quote some key points from each side, starting with the protagonist, one Devon Eriksen (an engineer, not military), whose core argument is the cost-benefit ratio of cheap drones to expensive defense systems on expensive platforms:

The way the US employs aircraft carriers is critical to its whole philosophy of global force projection and empire maintenance. They serve as a sort of mobile military base, allowing formidable US air power to blanket most of the globe without maintaining US air bases in hostile territory, where they are vulnerable on the ground and must be protected by occupation troops…. The problem is, we have exited the era of fortress battleships, and entered the era of cheap, plentiful drones and missiles. Which means that modern navies have precisely two types of craft: Submarines, and targets. It is not, in other words, the era of putting all your eggs in one basket.

Au contraire, argues one “Planefag” and this cost-benefit argument is not new:

The fact that carriers are an intrinsically offensive weapon system – easy to attack with and very hard to defend – was already known before the Battle of Midway proved it beyond a doubt. The entire history of carriers is one of doctrinal and technological development focused on addressing that intrinsic asymmetry…Such is the sophistication and prowess of [the AEGIS] system that its often mistaken for the first line of defense for carriers. However, it is not; anymore than the anti-aircraft guns of WWII task forces were. The first line of kinetic defense for aircraft carriers have always been their aircraft.
…
Fighters are essentially re-usable first stages for a myriad of weaponry, making said weapons both far cheaper, and far smaller (significant for magazine depth.)….and killing the archer rather than the arrow the preferred method for the air wing (a philosophy visible in the F-14’s design.)

In other words those big, fat, expensive targets that are aircraft carriers have never just sat on their butts waiting to be attacked. They’re hunters too and they will hunt down the source of the attacks on them, at distances far from them, irrespective of whether it’s another carrier, an airfield on an island or a bunker launching cruise missiles and drones. At that point the cost-benefit equation wobbles back, including drones:

Naturally this is where “drones” come in, but a one-way attack drone is just a very cheap cruise missile. As you say, precision costs, but so does every other metric of performance; drones are woefully slow which makes them easy to intercept with antiquated equipment. Much of the current “drone problem” stems simply from more wealthy nations having abandoned anti-aircraft guns for missiles, as AAA was sub-par against modern cruise missiles. But SPAAGs still exist and their manufacturers are making bank (Oerlikon et al.) Drones simply target a currently under-invested niche in the unit cost vs. mass force structures of most nations; relying on simple defense saturation to penetrate. (There IS a novel threat associated with drones; intelligent swarming coordinated over local mesh networks, but that’ll take time to mature.)

The re-birth of the old anti-aircraft gun in Ukraine is the current classic example of the unit-cost counter. He mentions a number of these cheap solutions, the first made me laugh:

  • “The USN has demonstrated this in the Red Sea by downing Houthi drones with their 5-inch guns – WWII solutions for WWII threats.”
  • “APKWS systems (cheap Hydra 70mm rockets with a dirt-simple laser seeker and steering fins) have been operationally deployed against drones routinely by both US forces and Ukraine.”
  • “More sophisticated measures are en-route; (see Epirus System’s “Leonidas,” which seems to be an AESA array utilizing beam-forming to target multiple drones at once with a maser that effects a hard-kill against internal electronics)”

He points out that for drones to counter that last one by hardening their electronics means higher unit-cost, and there are two other aspects that have been around for a long time that drones will have to deal with:

  • Evasion: you can’t hit what you can’t find.
    “To be targeted, the enemy not only needs to find it, but to maintain contact. Without position updates, any antiship weapon’s range is limited by the carrier’s speed versus the maximum area the missile can reasonably search autonomously….. things like arranging some escorts in formation around an oiler with corner reflectors on it, having planes fly faux landing patterns on a bare patch of ocean, and of course EWAR measures…Radar jammers and laser dazzlers obviously exist.”
  • Electromagnetic Maneuver Warfare:
    Which merely means using active jamming and EWAR to help obfuscate your position, both by blinding enemy sensors and by feeding them false contacts with deliberate emissions. Once again a carriers aircraft are paramount here; they can place sensors many hundreds of miles distant from the carrier….you might expect drones to simplify the recon challenge for asymmetric groups, but again the utility of aircraft show; [EG-18] Growlers can patrol far ahead, between threat vectors and the carrier’s potential location, and force drones to fly past them to search. The harshness of the inverse-square law guarantees their communication links won’t survive this – as well as massively increasing the chance they’ll be detected and destroyed anyway.

He’s also scathing about the idea of “cheap, light carriers” (Britain in the Falkland Islands War) and “Arsenal Ship” concepts (cheap to carry 200 Tomahawks or 600 drones but defenceless).

As always read the whole thing.

Finally, this reminder of a basic rule of warfare, including drones, and added to the comment above “killing the archer rather than the arrow“:

Any nation that can’t transport thousands of drones across oceans – and can’t reload and refuel them with sealift – won’t just fall behind, it’ll vanish from the battlefield. Logistics wins wars.