Comment on Sea drone warfare has arrived. The U.S. is floundering
Maggoty@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Lmao. By drones they mean guided explosives with an engine. Can we not blow shit out of proportion? You’re not getting the mission set of anything larger than a patrol boat out of a naval drone yet. The Navy is on top of drone research and when the time comes for drone plane carriers and drone arsenal ships I guarantee you they jump on it to reduce costs and losses.
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
That was the through before Ukraine managed to use sea drones effectively to sink multiple non-patrol ships. That just shows that tests and theoretical analyses only goes so far. Real life situations where stakes are real are great motivators.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You’re forgetting two key things. This is the Russian Navy. They have a ship that routinely tries to sink itself. And they can’t get their heads around proper training. They lost the Moskva because they were operating under enemy missile range with their air defense turned off.
And we don’t have the luxury of operating from a nearby friendly cost line. This is the entire reason the Navy wanted a modular mission system in the LCS. One of the missions was explicitly to act as a drone launch and recovery ship.
To illustrate the difference between capabilities, check out the low visibility drug runner boats the Cost Guard routinely catches in the Caribbean. We actually have years of experience catching exactly these kind of low visibility boats.
Look nobody is saying drones are a dead end. Just that this is a sensationalist article. The Navy is absolutely on board with drones.
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
That’s my point. Sea drone capabilities were never tested in an active war before, and US is not actively investing them because it’s against their current modus operandi. They even booted one of the top navy admiral because he wanted to change that. Ignoring the title, the article talks about budgeting and slow paper heavy approval processes and focus on big carriers, cruisers, frigates, and destroyers. Comparing Coast Guard’s experience where adversaries goal is to avoid instead of actively attack is not even close to being the same.
This might change now that Ukraine showed the effectiveness, but US is behind its adversaries in this area and falling more behind with current budget being already approved.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s just not true. The Navy has been working with drones for years now. Reuters is usually pretty reliable but they let industry reps highly exaggerate the situation.