Suppose you have five lasers on your nuclear aircraft carrier, they have 20km range, they need five seconds on target to destroy it (plus an insignificant amount of time to switch to the next target), and your radar/OpenCV/whatever is good enough to detect all the incoming drones. Suppose they go 200 km/h (56 m/s), which is a pretty leisurely clip for aircraft. If they all come into range at the same time, you have six minutes to burn them all up.
In this scenario it takes 361 drones to land one on an aircraft carrier, sinking it unless the attacker totally fucks up. If they're like these Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones the article says have destroyed 750 land vehicles (I guess in the Ukraine war alone?) that cost US$5M each, that's US$1.8 billion dollars to sink the aircraft carrier. That's not too bad; you can build a new aircraft carrier for US$9 billion or so.
But what if the drones cost US$5000 each? Or US$50? Or what if they travel at mach 2? Or are submarines, like loitering torpedoes or guided mines?
It may be more economical to just send drones to the country where the aircraft carrier is from to kill the family members of its military officers, or at least the ones who don't cooperate.
Although I have no particular love for US foreign policy and military adventurism, I fear we are passing out of a period of relative peace and entering a period of extreme unpredictability. There is no guarantee that the new stable equilibrium will have states or civilization in it.
In this scenario it takes 361 drones to land one on an aircraft carrier, sinking it unless the attacker totally fucks up. If they're like these Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones the article says have destroyed 750 land vehicles (I guess in the Ukraine war alone?) that cost US$5M each, that's US$1.8 billion dollars to sink the aircraft carrier. That's not too bad; you can build a new aircraft carrier for US$9 billion or so.
But what if the drones cost US$5000 each? Or US$50? Or what if they travel at mach 2? Or are submarines, like loitering torpedoes or guided mines?
It may be more economical to just send drones to the country where the aircraft carrier is from to kill the family members of its military officers, or at least the ones who don't cooperate.
Although I have no particular love for US foreign policy and military adventurism, I fear we are passing out of a period of relative peace and entering a period of extreme unpredictability. There is no guarantee that the new stable equilibrium will have states or civilization in it.