Pelic4n

Never heard of a power bottom?

M E L T D O W N

Le Mépris, Pierrot le Fou, A bout de souffle, la Chinoise, Alphaville

So, in your described scenario, drones are functionally no different than a missile barrage, except slower, cheaper and maybe easier to deploy. So:

- Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind of threats, like CIWS.

- Carriers don't exists in a vacuum, there are a lot of other systems in a modern carrier group.

- Just like launching a missile barrage, deploying the tens/hundreds of thousands of drones is going to be quite the logistical achievement, especially bringing it in range of a modern carrier group, designed to project force against threats hundreds of kilometers away.

- Drones have significant range/projection issues. The Bayraktar, at $2M a piece, has ~300km of range and can only bear a very small payload designed to engage armored ground targets, nothing that would threaten carriers or destroyers, even deployed en masse.

- The bigger the range, the bigger the payload, the bigger the size/costs. The effectiveness of your drone swarm is always limited by this equation. Millions of small aliexpress drones bearing the equivalent of a hand grenade are not going to do anything against a carrier provided it can be deployed at all. You would need to be <10km away due to their range limitation and at this stage, there are already fighter jets and destroyers sitting on top of you.

- No single munition under the kiloton order of magnitude will sink an aircraft carrier. For a drone or anything under the scale of cruise missiles/MOAB, this means nuclear. Hand-grenade sized nuclear explosives in drone swarms? I wish! But to quote the fantastic game Highfleet, once you get the genie out, you cannot put it back in the bottle. If you plan to bring nuclear weapons to a war, everybody already has ICBMs.

tl;dr: Drones swarms don't disrupt the current status quo: Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single engagement. The usefullness of drone swarms is not against modern carrier groups but small-scale asymmetrical engagements, such as the guerilla operations currently carried in Ukraine or in Syria, in which small drones are incredibly effective weapons. This is still a big deal, as it is the most likely form of conflict we're going to see in the rest of this century, not full-on peer-to-peer conflicts between superpowers.

Correction: A guy hiding in a bush wasn't able to reliably defeat tanks before.

Handheld old anti-tank weapons like RPGs with HEAT warheads were extremely unreliable, defeated by reactive explosive armors, successful only at very close range and so on. Modern ATGMs able to be fired from kilometers away and with >90% kill rates completely changes the dynamic. Those systems are only going to get smarter and cheaper when there is a physical limit on the armor+weight+cost+logistical support equation for tanks.

>Do you (honestly) believe the US doesn't have tank armor that can withstand a (from the top) hit from a Javelin?

If this exists, why did the USMC binned their tanks 2 years ago stating they weren't cost-effective anymore? I'll believe this exists when I'll see it, but so far we have seen $4M tanks defeated by $100K javelins with a 93% kill rate, and so far cope cages have done nothing against them.

Reported kill rate of javelins fired against tanks in Ukraine is 93%. Just saying.

$4M tanks are defeated by a $40K NLAW. Much like cuirassiers cavalry who were rendered obsolete by muskets becoming rifles with increased penetration, it's not because tanks don't works, it's because it's so cheap to kill one and so expensive to make one.

Until very recently, 2 guys hiding in a bush couldn't kill a tank, you needed a predator drone, an helicopter or some other advanced system requiring heavy logistics. Now behind every bush and every road corner is a potential enemy able to defeat you. With >90% kill ratio for javelins, the tanks needs to be lucky for weeks on end to survive, and the ATGM needs to be lucky only once.

I want to see the picture

Enforcing the No-Fly zone actually means running SEAD missions to take care of those, including in russian territory. That's why it would bring WW3.

Don't you love it when the once in a lifetime opportunity for generational wealth is also a great fundamental investment? In case the biggest short squeeze the market would have ever seen, with the potential to crash the US economy, somehow doesn't happen (damn hedgies!). With all of that that, it doesn't matter that physical sales of video games are dying and that the company is bleeding out money with a loss of $100 millions in Q3 2021 alone.