>There is a good chance this one becomes the Wework of this decade.
It's very different from WeWork which was basically just subletting office space with beer taps. At least SpaceX had done significant stuff with the rockets and Starlink.
The comparison was not about the strength of the business, it was about how the attempt to IPO and the original S-1 was the trigger for more realistic price discovery for Wework
My comment was that it is possible that by trying/becoming public SpaceX also will go through that same
process once their numbers become available.
Unfortunately, diplomatic conflict resolution is prone to failures and the cost of failure is really really high.
What Iran is doing is telling the empire that their war has a cost on their economy and reputation. And the only reason they are able to do so is because of drones/missiles (basically automated Kamikaze pilots) and I would also argue GenAI since they producing a lot of PR videos which used be expensive to make. If Iran had to fight the war with their people, US would have won due to the imbalance of destructive power.
In other words, we are witnessing a new kind of system for conflict resolution. Not war and not diplomacy. More of drones/AI/robotics systems hitting economies while trying to avoid human life losses in order to win the narrative war. This no where similar to any war of the past. The key change is waging wars without people, i.e the automation of warfare. Which is closer to a video game than traditional wars.
But people think of my statement as reductionist to the current causalities, which is not my point, obviously we are far from having fully automated warfare but we are seeing the first generation. The closest example is the fight between Iran/UAE basically a network of digital systems defending against another.
And if my reasoning hold, we might end up in a more peaceful earth.
There seems a bit of an acceleration ~ 50-100k years from evolving brains similar to modern ones to agriculture, ~8k year from there to writing, ~4k to the printing press, ~400 till computers, ~40 till the web and so on. Each of those has kind of speeded intellectual progress and AI will probably be another speeding up.
A fun way to look at this is that the "long head" (ramp) of the singularity began some hundreds of thousands of years ago. We're just living in teh exciting bit.
Many tens of millions if you want to start with the emergence of primates, etc.
Google doesn't have to fight context windows. They can cache and store an AI response to a Google query without having to worry about much other than locale etc. You can't do that a dozen messages into an LLM conversation.
Yeah, and Jakub didn't seem to have much background in AI research. I'm sure he's a great coder and did a PhD on fast algorithms but it's a different area to pushing forward AI really.
I figure the US was aware of the scale of Iran. It seems the US were talking with about three possible people in the Iranian government who could take over like what happened in Venezuela but their initial strikes killed them all which was a bit of a screw up. (Trump vid https://youtu.be/Zokz9DJ0KhI)
And the expectation was that IRGC and Islamists just accepts that and Israel stops bombing Iran at that point? Why would Israel find that sufficient considering that would give them nothing?
And the other thing is that I just dont understand how that can be called a regime change. Venezuela was not regime change either - Venezuelan regime stayed exactly the same as before, but now USA is co-responsible for the abuses.
>The era of carrier-dominated airpower is fading, as cheap, unmanned anti-ship weapons reshape naval warfare, whether US planners are ready for it or not.
is not really backed up by reality. Pretty much the whole US operation so far, destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers. If anything it demonstrates how powerful they are.
Also straits being closed to shipping by whatever power controls the shores is not a new thing. The Bosphophorous has been closed on and off by the Ottomans or Turks since 1453 and the allies couldn't break through in WW1. They can send raiding ships, use canons, artillery, naval mines etc. You don't need the new tech.
> destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers
No. This is absurd claim that can't physically comport with sortie generation math.
CSIS report from first 3 weeks noted Israel did more than half of strikes on ~15,000 targets... all Israel's hits would be from land basing.
2xCSG at surge for 3 weeks = ~6k sorties, ~20% for kinetic strike (80% of sorties supportive, cap, tanking, ew etc). Optimistically carriers hit ~2000 targets when not standoff during first 3 weeks. Likely strike compositions: Israel from land, 50%, US from regional land ~35% (we know lots of none carrier aviation was involved), carriers ~15%.
The real kicker is CSGs since been pushed to standoff - kinetic strike ratio to dwindle to single digit % sorties at those distances, making carrier cost:strike ratio even more unfavourable. This something most expect from peer/near peer adversaries, not Iran, i.e. carriers seem vulnerable to lower tier of adversaries than originally thought.
The point is a country like Iran can, in 2026, force the US Navy to keep an large stand off distance. How much further could a country like China keep the Navy back? What about in 10 years?
Eventually you are beyond the range of being able to project force or risking losing billions invested in one asset to a $50k missile. That is where reality is heading.
Seems like USN can still do whatever it was made for from this large standoff distance, also seems like it wasn't made for chasing individual nondescript trucks in a hundreds-miles-long mountainous shoreline.
One of the primary functions of navies historically has been to secure vital shipping lanes. It’s a big deal that USN can’t seem to fulfill that function anymore.
I'm not sure that the USN would have been any more effective 30 years ago if it tried to make a narrow waterway that is off-shore from a medium-strength world power accessible for safe commercial ship traffic. Effective anti-ship missiles have been around for a long time. Given how understandably sensitive commercial ship crews and owners are to even slight danger, there's just no way to reduce the risk to the necessary near-zero without a prolonged air campaign and/or land invasion to support the naval effort.
> I'm not sure that the USN would have been any more effective 30 years ago if it tried to make a narrow waterway that is off-shore from a medium-strength world power accessible for safe commercial ship traffic.
Yeah I'm not too knowledgeable about this subject, I'm just theorizing.
My thesis is that the only ways that someone could control a waterway was through naval power, air power, or missile power. Air and naval power is negated by a stronger air force/navy, and 30 years ago missiles were only available to a small number of advanced economies nations. Now, high-quality (or at least credibly dangerous to shipping) missiles and drones can be manufactured cheaply by many nations.
A medium-strength world power that it Iran only figured out how to make anti-ship missiles only 25 years ago. They sure got their hands on Chinese ones a bit before that, but that quantity just didn't amount to strait-blocking capability.
The technology has changed. The navies used to be able to protect shipping.
Now the task is much more difficult.
Just as battleships replaced ships of the line, and were in turn replaced by carriers, all due to technology changes.
Maybe there will be drone swarms or some other future magitech being able to protect shipping.
Or maybe the civilization will collapse due to internal (income inequality, widespread employment of AI), external (ecological disasters) or other (demographics, nuclear WW3) pressures before such technologies are developed.
I think the point being made is that before Iranian drone doctrine (they were the originators of the long range drones, the FPV drones and sea drone which have dominated the Ukraine way too).
A US CSG could simply sit in the Hormuz strait shoot down any incoming missiles and keep it open.
Right now the US has 3 CSG in the middle east and nearly 50000 troops. After weeks of intensive bombing the strait remains closed and any associated asset in the region is at risk the loss of the E3 to drones is particularly shocking.
> A US CSG could simply sit in the Hormuz strait shoot down any incoming missiles and keep it open.
They can't even do that in their own bases. Most of US defenses have been severely overestimated due to propaganda. They hadn't been tested and when they were they've shown themselves lacking.
Guided missile means, metal airframe, jet engine, depending on targets thermal imaging or radar terminal guidance, radar altimeters, terrain imaging radars, 100 - 500 kilogram payload.
Remote guidance is a very hard problem, modern computers have made it much easier to solve.
Even an 80s missile, required hundred of thousands of dollars of equipment just for guidance. Now all you need is a simple computer, a cheap camera and a cheap accelerometer.
Drones are much easier to down than missiles, but they make it up in volume.
Do you mean stuff like FP-5 Flamingo? These are really cruise missiles. Why would you call it a suicide drone? Because it has wings? Tomahawks have wings. Because the design is based on a target drone, so what the capabilities are very much inline with munitions we call cruise missiles.
The drone/guided missile divide is really about dividing a continuum which on one end has foam wings and raspberry pie equivalents wrapped in tin foil and on the other million dollar tomahawks. The distinction is the price tag and the capabilities really.
Flamingo is pretty close to a cruise missile in many ways. You correctly observe that this is a continuum but most but not all drones have props whereas all missiles are either rocket based or jet engine based and missiles tend to be a lot faster and do not allow for a change of plan after launch.
So no. But the Lyutyi (sp?), the FP-1 and the Nynja all qualify as drones (and there are many, many more, it's a veritable zoo) if you make that distinction, as do all of the sea-borne gear.
The ones that are decimating the russian oil industry are a bit more impressive than that. The foam wing ones are mostly Shaheds, the Ukrainian ones tend to be made of various plastics and/or fibreglass or composites for the more specialized stuff.
Imo foam wings and low cost components is very impressive. Low cost easy production is an actual tangible benefit. If it destroys the target and is easy cheap to make, it is a better arm.
Yeah not so much for it's radars, or for the f35 parked on the flight deck, which may be you know loaded with thousands of gallons of fuel and hundreds of pounds of missiles and bombs.
Sure, it won't sink it, but operations may be disrupted, for hours to days.
Rocket engines are typically used for short range missiles like AGM-65, or ballistic missiles. All cruise missiles use jet engines to achieve long ranges.
Cost, I'd guess? There must be a reason why Russia and Ukraine are using more drones than missiles in their strikes. And while capabilities are somewhat different, if a ship carrying oil or LNG get hit by either one, it's going to have some consequences
And one of them can't scratch the paint on a modern naval vessel. Anti-ship warheads alone weigh more than an entire Shahed-136 drone.
As has been demonstrated countless times in SINKEX training, it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel. And even then they usually don't actually sink.
Nothing you can cheaply build in your garage will do meaningful damage to a large naval vessel. It will have neither the weight nor the penetration required.
You might need to consider lateral options. What if someone flew 1,000 drones at the windows on the bridge? How many BBs can hit that fancy radar before it is out of service?
Nothing/neither/cant when millions of dollars and hundreds of lives are on the line? 'Are you sure about that?' Defending against these types of threats is well worth considering.
It's the radars really for destroyers. The bridge is not actually where the ship is run during combat.
There is a room called the combat information center, that's where the ship is run from during combat, and that is behind armor, even in modern warships.
Additionally ships are separated into semi independent zones, that can take control of the ship, and continue fighting even if the rest of the ship is on fire.
The real liabilities are the radars, and the rest of the sensors in surface combat ships and the airplanes on deck in the case of aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers in general are heavily armored compared to other modern warships and it takes a significant amount of firepower to even disable them much less sink them.
That's great if you're in a shallow anchorage (average depth: 45 feet). Less so if you sink in the Arabian sea and you're under fire during the refloating process.
I also suspect modern ships are a little more sensitive to complete immersion.
> In May 2019, the Minister of Defense was presented with a report from Defense Material which concluded that a possible repair would cost 12–14 billion and take more than five years. The cost of purchasing a new corresponding vessel was estimated at NOK 11–13 billion, with a completion time of just over five years.
Your scenario imagines a naive and completely fictional concept of how modern naval systems actually work. That you can’t conceive of why what you are suggesting is effectively impossible means you truly don’t understand the domain.
The reason designed-for-purpose anti-ship missiles/drones are so expensive is they are literally designed to be somewhat effective at executing exactly the scenario you are laying out, while not being naive about the defenses that military ships actually have. Anybody that understands the capability space knows that your scenario wouldn’t survive contact with real defenses.
You are making an argument from fiction. Do you take the “hackers breaking cryptography” trope from Hollywood at face value?
Yup. There’s the concept of “mission kill”. It’s very difficult to sink a battleship with 5” guns. Use them to blast off all the range finders, radars, and secondary battery and that ship will be headed home after the battle.
The difference is strategic. A mission kill is a repairable loss. It is an order of magnitude easier to fix a battleship than to build a new one.
Of course, you can use boatloads of cheap drones to kill the radars and CIWS, destroy the planes on deck and other juicy targets.
Then launch a second wave of heavy anti-ship missiles (which you might have too few, due to their costs) to transform mission kills into really sunken ships.
If they're small - like quadcopter size - then how did you get them in range of a ship more then 10 miles off shore?
If they're large, like back of a pickup sized (which is roughly a Shahed[1] - link for scale) then how did you transport and move them without being noticed and interdicted?
For comparison one of Russia's largest drone attacks on Ukraine, and thus in the world, happened recently and included about 1000 Shaheds over a distributed area.
You're talking about flying a 1000 of something into exactly one target which has CIWS designed to track and kill supersonic missiles at close range (and is likely in a flotilla with data linked fire control).
You might get lucky I guess but I absolutely wouldn't bet on it.
They're also using their USVs as drone motherships.
> If they're large, like back of a pickup sized (which is roughly a Shahed - link for scale) then how did you transport and move them without being noticed and interdicted?
The Taliban moved pickup-sized loads around just fine.
> You're talking about flying a 1000 of something into exactly one target which has CIWS designed to track and kill supersonic missiles at close range (and is likely in a flotilla with data linked fire control).
Here's one failing to shoot a single Shahed in Baghdad down.
It takes a surprisingly small warhead to destroy a 100 million dollar radar array. A mission kill requires much less damage than actually sinking a ship. Take out an Arleigh Burkes radars and it's a 2 billion dollar container ship.
It's more like, through the combined use of drones, sea-drones, and anti-ship missiles, backed by the productive might and surveillance capability of NATO, against a weak Russian navy. Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy.
> Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy.
I mean yes thats true, but you also have to look at the capacity to renew what they are using to fight the war.
Iran appears to have a large supply of drones, enough to overwhelm US defences. Each drone is ~$50k and takes a few weeks to build, the anti-dorne missle (depending on what one it is) costs $4m and take longer.
If trump does decide to take Kharg island, then to stop the troops from being slamai sliced they'll need an efficient, cheap anti drone system, which I don't think the US has (apart from the Phalanx, but there arent enough of those)
To stop the drone threat, they'd have to clear roughly a 1500km circle. no small feat.
the bigger issue is that the goal if this war is poorly defined. It was supposedly to do a hit and run, and gain a captive client. Had they listened to any of the intelligence, rather than the ego, they would have known this would have happened. that has failed, now what, what do they need to achieve? There is no point committing troops if they are there for show. (there was no real point in this war either, well for the US at least.)
You can if you live in the US! It isn’t particularly expensive either, high explosives are industrial chemistry. A few dollars per kilo. Maybe a little bit more if you want something fancy.
Thanks to movies, people both seriously overestimate and underestimate the capabilities of highly engineered explosive devices, albeit in different dimensions. Generally speaking, sophisticated military targets are not susceptible to generic explosives. A drone with a hundred kilos of explosive will essentially bounce off a lot of targets. An enormous amount of engineering goes into designing an explosive device optimized to defeat that specific target. They use supercomputers to get this stuff right. Exotic engineered explosive devices are unreasonably capable.
TBH, once you realize the insane amount of engineering that goes into it, it kind of takes the fun out of it. A lot of high-leverage research goes into aspects an amateur would never think about.
This is in some ways a blessing. Amateurs with bad intentions almost always fail at the execution because it isn’t something you can learn by reading the Internet.
Amateurs who try to build their own explosives usually either fail to explode or explode killing the builder.
An older friend of mine at Boeing told me how when he was a teen, he had a teen friend who built a pipe bomb. They drove off to a field to set it off. It didn't explode, so his friend went to investigate. Then it went off, and my friend had the pleasure of driving his gutted friend to the hospital to die.
There's a selection process at work where smart people who know what they're doing don't try to assemble bombs in their garage for fun. If there's a legitimate reason like your country is fighting an existential war the kinds of people who can do things start doing things.
But it's just rare having a person smart enough to be able to do it be stupid enough to try. (and the people who do are nutjob terrorists like Timothy McVeigh)
FWIW, McVeigh got a lot of the technical details right, including many non-obvious ones. That was a sophisticated attempt by someone that actually knew what they were doing. It goes a long way toward explaining why that particular bombing was so effective.
That said, plenty of extremely smart people assemble bombs in their garage for fun. It is almost a rite of passage, at least in the US. The fact that historically you could just buy the common stuff incentivized smart people to attempt more technically difficult things for bragging rights. Most people have no concept for how available legal high explosives are in the US, even after 9/11 made it a bit more difficult.
Cheap as hell, doesn’t need a launchpad and can be launched from a pick up truck, super easy to make and can be scattered all over the country so there’s no central location to bomb to stop them, fly literally meters of the ground so they’re very hard to detect and you can make tens of thousands of them very quickly and very easily.
This is delusional. Iran has thousands of ASM on the coastline. They need 1 to make it through to take out a tanker. Even the best anti missile systems we have aren’t 99.99% reliable. It was always a losing proposition. Iran has always been able to close the strait.
What I don’t get is why we need to take Kharg island. Can’t we just blockade ships selling Iranian oil?
I think the collective take might be too focused on the kinetic picture to see the underlying issue(s).
1) we want Iranian oil flowing and being bought elsewhere for the economy and to avoid hard decisions in Beijing, and as we’ve recently heard ad nausea money is fungible so… if one hasn’t thought to invade, dominate and occupy mountainous terrain filled with holy people, then ‘open’ means money to The Baddies.
2) it’ll only take a few wrecks to create navigation hazards, tankers are huge and that strait is shallow and narrow. The cleanup crews are slower, they also need massive ships.
3) let’s take a 0.01% reliability of missile attacks… drones, rpgs, suicide attacks, artillery, kamikaze plane attacks, mines, and trebuchets are also out there. So, again, unless we’re invading… fuhgeddabout 100%
And, fatally:
4) it’s not the missiles, it’s the threat, and who is insuring the massive money-boats. If your insurance company thought your car would, 0.01% of the time, be blown up resulting in a total wreck and complete loss of cargo and future revenue, your policy would not be what it is. You insure your oil boat for trips, and if not you don’t move it.
Trump doesn’t decide this, BigBoat Insurance brokers decide this, with their wallets and vibes. 0.01% x An Oil Tanker (slow, giant, vulnerable, + oil leak cleanup and ecosystem damage, loss of life) x totally foreseeable circumstances = a ‘closed’ straight on demand. Unless, again, the plan is invado-conquering.
> destroying much of Iran's military and leadership
Good at hitting targets, terrible at achieving goals. Same as Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. Were the Taliban destroyed by killing their upper echelons several times over? In terms of resilience, the Iranians are similar, arguably much more so.
> Were the Taliban destroyed by killing their upper echelons several times over?
Of course not, because that wasn't the goal and would be impossible, because we were recreating the conditions that led to the Taliban taking control in the first place (corrupt and amoral warlords oppressing the populace). Afghanistan's strategic location and suitability for poppy farming and generating dark money flows is why we went in. It was the staging ground for the plans to overthrow "Iraq [...] Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan" (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/9/22/us-plans-to-attack-...). We're still involved in active conflicts in most of those countries.
The US state is so large, that there are different constituencies operating within it. There was certainly a group that wanted the new state to succeed. I don't disagree with much of what you said though.
You're very right, it's important not to forget that hindsight makes the cloudiest things clear. At the time, it seemed as if almost everyone supported the invasion and thought we were taking revenge for 9/11 and liberating the oppressed from a brutal theocracy. It was not until later, sometimes much later, that the facts became apparent. Very few people knew that the Taliban had offered to surrender Bin Laden and hand over Al Qaeda members before the invasion, and almost nobody outside the military knew about what kind of people we were supporting in their stead. Even today when the historical situation is relatively clear I don't think many people have really thought much about the many uncomfortable facts of the opiate/opiod "epidemic" and it's connection to that occupation.
Fort Bragg has been the transit point for most opiates imported to the US in the past 30 years. Cheap illegal opiates in addition to overprescription of opioids made the problem much worse.
I think it was achieved by two nuclear armed countries openly amassing their assets in the region for months. Any conflict between peer non-nuclear nations would have probably began with the country in Iran’s position sinking those carriers. Thanks to US and Israeli nukes, they were free to start killing people without fear of getting surprised.
It is unlikely that Iran decided to not sink US carriers because of fear of nuclear retaliation. It is much more likely that before the air attack started, Iran's leadership preferred not to do anything that could make an attack more likely, such as attacking carriers. And after the invasion started, they would have loved to attack carriers but did not have the military capability to do so.
They haven't "acknowledged any allegiances or biases" though, they just dismissed them because they're not of the right ideology. If they don't engage on the merits or offer substantive criticisms, there is no discussion, just a cheering contest.
This comment did catch my attention. While I am willing to accept some level of bias from various parties, I have an odd feeling that we about to argue that reality is in the eye of the beholder.
With that in mind, what do you think the reality is? I am not leading you on. I am genuinely curious.
> is not really backed up by reality. Pretty much the whole US operation so far, destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers. If anything it demonstrates how powerful they are.
The country with 0.3% of global spending in military is putting a noticeable dent in assets of country that has 35% of global spending in military and are begging allies for help coz they can't even stop the drones
With that level of difference you'd expect whole thing to end already and yet it is not. So any actor at even 10% scale of US going all in in drones would probably obliterate US navy without all that much. US is behind and frankly invested in wrong tech over the years.
That is not to say carriers are going away any time soon, you need to ship the firepower to the target somehow, but one filled to 3/4 with drones would probably be far more effective
The Chinese have drone carrier ships already in fleet and I think that is likely the future addition to fleets that is necessary. I am not sure how much the era of human controlled flight is coming to an end but certainly substantial drone capability and anti drone defence is urgently required.
I agree in general, but I quibble with the "noticeable dent" part. I think that Iran is doing well given the enormous difference in power between it and the US/Israeli/Gulf Arab coalition, but the only way in which it is putting a noticeable dent in that coalition's assets is economical. And it is only capable of doing that because it is next to a vital narrow waterway and not far from some of the Gulf Arabs' fossil fuel facilities. So I don't think the situation generalizes.
>That is not to say carriers are going away any time soon, you need to ship the firepower to the target somehow, but one filled to 3/4 with drones would probably be far more effective
Why would you do it at the slow speed of a carrier though? Just load up a couple C17 or B1B and you can dump that payload anywhere in the world in under a day I expect. Better yet, engineer a minuteman to hold a drone swarm. Deliver that swarm anywhere in the world in 20 minutes.
The issues the US faces are political and humanitarian (and economic) rather than military. I don't see any compelling evidence that the US couldn't open the straits if it really wanted to, it's just that the cost in lives and hardware would be unlike anything the US has seen since Vietnam, maybe even the second world war. And of course, once you open the strait, you have to keep it open. The whole thing is a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.
It should probably also be pointed out that doing nothing has a cost too, and it's probable that the bill for doing nothing over a long period of time has come due. I, like most people, never bought the WMD claims leading up to Iraq. I'm not sure what to think here. I certainly don't buy that Iran wasn't working towards getting the bomb after how well it worked out for North Korea. I can't claim to know the calculus involved in determining whether or not it's worth going to war with Iran to stop them from getting the bomb.
Apart from the oil, there is the fertiliser that isn't being shipped. That means that august crops are going to be down. Assuming its a good year. prices go up, which means we can expect a wave of overthrown governments (similar to the arab spring) in 12-24 months time.
For the USA that means inflation, along with a credit crunch (probably)
Given you compare the cost of a US operation to open the straits to the Vietnam War, it seems prudent to mention that the outcome of the Vietnam war, according to Wikipedia, was a North Vietnam victory.
> I don't see any compelling evidence that the US couldn't open the straits if it really wanted to, it's just that the cost in lives and hardware would be unlike anything the US has seen since Vietnam, maybe even the second world war
The US invaded Iraq and toppled its government; Iraqi militias are still firing drones and missiles at US bases. Tankers and oil infra are much softer targets… all it takes is hitting one or two tankers and folks will stop shipping.
> I don't see any compelling evidence that the US couldn't open the straits if it really wanted to, it's just that the cost in lives and hardware would be unlike anything the US has seen since Vietnam, maybe even the second world war.
The second half of that sentence is literally explaining why the "impossible" you reject in the first part.
The US wasn't doing nothing about Iran though. The JCPOA was a thing, before trump tore it up. This approach is about the dumbest way Iran could be handled, which makes sense given who is giving the orders.
To add to that, the current take that the US could just walk away from the conflict is incredibly naive - Iran will decide when this is over, and it won't be before the November elections. Before the US attacked, blocking the strait was only a potential, now Trump gave Iran the chance to prove that they are capable of doing it. And why on earth would Iran now give that away for free?
>destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers. If anything it demonstrates how powerful they are.
When you have a hammer that costs billions of dollars in budget you tend to find excuses to use it lest you lose that budget. Imagine if their were no carriers. US airpower just takes off from gulf state airbases and same thing happens to iran.
Unless the US is fighting an air battle in the middle of the ocean, they can probably get by without carriers.
Did you go to War College to learn this? I mean seriously, do you really think they would spend billions of dollars and millions of man hours training …. I mean, I’d it’s possible that maybe you just don’t understand the dynamics of war fighting and there is a reason for carriers to exist besides “fighting in the ocean?”
I agree that this conflict in Iran doesn’t really indicate that the aircraft carrier is any weaker now than it ever was.
Though I do worry about the possibility of a more sophisticated opponent being able to launch swarms of drones and missiles at aircraft carriers. More than any air defense could ever stop.
Carriers have been in question long before this conflict. There's been a big question as to how effective and/or survivable a carrier battle group will be in the South Pacific, especially given China's long range anti-ship missiles.
There's been a whole ramp up of very exquisite technology to try to get the upper hand here, but I don't expect we'll see the carrier be the force it has been over the last few generations. It's just too tempting a target.
Long-range anti-ship missiles of old are also obsolete, they and their launch problems are also too expensive for their vulnerability. A salvo Shahed-style drones launched from expendable unmanned vessels would overload a carrier group air defences way cheaper than old school ASMs from frigates.
New weaponry poses great challenges for these platforms. I don’t know if a swarm of very slow moving drones would be my biggest concern though.
You can afford to spend a few million when you’re taking down billions of dollars worth of hardware.
I would think a simultaneous barrage of maneuvering hypersonic missiles would pose a much bigger threat. A CIWS or three can take down a lot of slow drones.
but if you know there are 3 CIWS, you know they can move the pew-pew pipe at some radians per second this axis, and that axis, you put the drones in a formation to maximize the need for muzzle movement, estimate how many rounds are in them (or how long can they fire before getting overheated)
and send that number + 1 drone.
.
.
of course it's a bit oversimplified, but really with decoys, and putting cheap shaped charges on them ... they can fuck up the launch/landing surfaces, the AA capabilities, there's absolutely no way to jam them if they have the "last mile" set to automatic.
(yes, in theory a dumb and big fireball or good old flack can take out a lot of them, seems trivial, but in practice we don't see that, instead we see faster drones trying to intercept them, currently with FPV remote control)
I get the feeling you haven't read the article. The carrier is not in drone range precisely for that reason.
The reason so many tankers have been lost and that E3 sentry is that the carriers are having to stay out of the preferred range and rely on refueling for the bombing campaign.
If the CSG could move to the Iranian coast they wouldn't have to maintain a constant chain of refueling tankers which have become so vulnerable.
>The carrier is not in drone range precisely for that reason.
umm, you have no idea what you are talking about.
the Iranian Shahed drones typically have an operational travel distance of approximately 1,200 to 2,000 kilometers (roughly 750 to 1,250 miles).
and
>USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) CSG: As of March 30, 2026, this strike group is operating in the Arabian Sea supporting Operation Epic Fury. Satellite imagery from mid-February and March 2026 placed the Lincoln roughly 700 kilometers (approx. 430 miles) off the coast of Iran and Oman.
All right, they have the range. Let's say a carrier is 700 km away and the drone has a range of 1200 km. Great.
Now, does it have the kill chain to supply it with an accurate targeting fix and update it during the flight? Or, does it have a radar good enough to find the Lincoln on its own? If it doesn't, then it's a really big ocean. But sure, they've got the range.
Cheap drones are pretty useless against large naval vessels. Making a dent in those ships requires a heavy, specialized penetrating warheads. And even then you'll need to score several hits.
Just the warhead alone on a standard anti-ship weapon weighs more than an entire Shahed-136 drone.
Seems likely to be even worse now. USS Ford out of action, removed from region due to "laundry fire" and some socks in the toilets. Also USN has far fewer carriers to deploy. Three or more were deployed continuously off Vietnam for years at a time.
Imagine trying to launch fighters when there are explosions on the deck from swarms of drones. And of course the fighters themselves could be hit and destroyed. An aircraft carrier that can't launch fighters is pretty much worthless.
I disagree: lots of cheap drones would be extremely effective against an aircraft carrier. They don't need to sink the ship; they just need to damage the jets or disrupt operations on the flight deck. Even a small drone is a serious threat to a jet. How can a carrier defend against a drone swarm? They only have so much ammunition for those CWIS guns, and defending against the swarm will probably cost a lot more than the swarm itself does.
Of course, this assumes the carrier is within range of the drone swarm, but that seems to be the assumption in this line of argument.
Eventually, I think they'll have more cost-effective defenses against small, cheap drones, but they don't have them yet.
Yes, but it is not certain that cheap drones have the range or navigational technology to reach and hit a carrier in the current circumstances. More expensive drones do, but that's a different matter.
The Shahed drones have more than enough range for this, easily. Whether they're "cheap" I guess depends on your perspective; they're certainly not as cheap as some handheld drone, but they're still pretty cheap compared to all the stuff the US is using now.
Regarding drones they are, by definition, not very sturdy: for they're drones and not B52 bombers or bunkers.
What's very likely going to happen is that, just I can take a Browning B525 Sporter balltrap shotgun and shoot any civilian drone from afar because the gun shoots an expanding cloud of tiny, cheap, pellets, armies are now going to come up with systems to both defend and destroy drones.
I'm not saying the drones used in war are the same as DJI drones: what I'm saying is that with the proper tech, they're much less expensive to take down than, say, a ballistic missile or an aircraft carrier.
Anyone seeing this conflict and thinking that the militaro-industrial complex isn't hard at work working on solutions to take down drones is smoking heavy stuff.
Ukrainian and Russian did it already (although it's nothing serious, it's just an example): here we were talking about actual tiny drones, carrying explosives, and running towards vehicles. As a cheap defense measures, they started immediately adding metallic "spikes" (not unlike hairs) to the vehicles, so that the drone wouldn't reach the vehicle's body and instead explode when hitting the mettalic spikes.
War has always been about "tech x" / "anti tech x". This time is not going to be different.
> Though I do worry about the possibility of a more sophisticated opponent being able to launch swarms of drones and missiles at aircraft carriers.
China. They're demos of thousands of drones fully synchronized in the sky at night making nice 3D patterns with everybody on the ground going "aaaah" and "wooooow" is a display of military capability.
I'm not saying it's not a concern: but it's not as if the US (and others) were going to sit and think "oh drones exists, the concept of war is over".
It sounds like you agree vehemently with the article, modulo the reframe of what the military had to already as solely your personal worry, about a hypothetical, that could only occur with a more sophisticated opponent, in the future.
How many of the strikes in Iran were 100% organic Navy assets? Sure, f18's took off and landed on carriers, but they tanked a couple times before dropping their bombs. The CSG helps, but was it really the thing enabling strikes? We have a massive air base in Qatar and other capabilities in the region. We are using bases all over the place to support these operations. The CSG helps... but isn't crucial to what is going on here. Now, bring S-3 organic tanking back and maybe the CSG would have a -little- more legitimacy.
Yeah I don’t find this article particularly insightful. If we don’t have troops on the ground to prevent attacks in the straight, it would be always be vulnerable despite superiority. Shit if we don’t control the land, they could drop a bunch jet skis with bombs in the water in the middle of the night. The straight is only 21 miles wide at some points
I think the majority of Americans are on Ukraine's side but of course the president has other ideas. The UK has some Ukranian drone manufacturing going on https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0dvjwygk1o
> I think the majority of Americans are on Ukraine's side but of course the president has other ideas.
I think that it's understood that when we use shorthand such as "US is not supporting Ukraine" that it is the respective governments that we are discussing. The point about the "majority of Americans" is true enough (though you might say that the majority of Americans care about the price of gasoline and groceries and little else politically) but it is rather irrelevant if the administration does the opposite.
In other words, "thoughts and prayers from people" is not enough to make you an ally. Money and policy is the real thing.
Yeah though most of the US government excluding Trump is pro Ukraine. Biden at least gave some weapons and Lindsey Graham pushed a tough sanctions package which was working quite well until stopped due to the Iran invasion.
It's very different from WeWork which was basically just subletting office space with beer taps. At least SpaceX had done significant stuff with the rockets and Starlink.
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