Posted on 05/25/2025 3:29:52 PM PDT by Retain Mike
The government then has to go find another sucker who has to find, hire, and train up staff before producing.
Obviously, but I don't suspect Houthi drones are very fast or rugged. It just seemed to me that "shooting skeet" was a way to save considerable money.
Now that makes so much sense. I can definitely see DOD and Congress devising ways to sabotage our military.
Do you mean "scaling up?"
Regards,
Do you mean "to scale up?"
Regards,
FYI: Many of our current destroyers only have the aft Phalanx CIWS installation. There’s about a 90 degree or more arc forward that it can’t fire in.
The Houthi drones aren’t terribly rugged, no. And yes, the CIWS Gatling is a good answer where it can come to bear and ranges on the target - much cheaper than a SeaRAM missile, a Sea Sparrow or a Standard SM-2/3 missile.
Unfortunately, one of the problems with the Houthis is that Iran and others have armed them with drones *and* some pretty serious antishipping missiles. They are known to send them in swarms with drones leading the way and sucking up AA munitions so the missiles can attempt to get through. The reason you need more range is to prolong the engagement time so that you might be able to shoot down all the incoming before an actual antiship missile gets through.
The Gatling is a good idea for onesie-twosie drone attacks, but needs help against swarms or group threats. So something else needs to be used as well, or we need a lot more Phalanx CIWS on ships with deeper magazines.
Negative. We have no suitable air drone factories in the US to actually scale up. We would have to create new ones. However, as Ukraine and the Houthis have demonstrated, it’s not actually terribly hard to make an first person drone - they’re sold as childrens’ toys for basic models these days, after all - but if you don’t have the chips and in this case the batteries and motors to make one fly, you’re not getting anywhere. We don’t have the chips.
Correction: It’s not hard to make a plant to crank out first person drones. You can have one going within a month if you have parts supplies.
Thanks.
Perfectly reasonable. Yet one would think that with the right software the radar could distinguish the faster vehicles and use the missiles more sparingly.
So something else needs to be used as well, or we need a lot more Phalanx CIWS on ships with deeper magazines.
Yep. That was obvious two years ago.
Some of the antiship missiles and some of the drones can fly at about the same speeds. There are loitering antiship missiles these days, just like there are loitering drones, and they can be roughly the same size and radar return. It’s not just a matter of “the faster ones are the lethal missiles” - additionally, some of the drones are large enough to be loaded with anti-armor warheads and used as suicide drones, turning them into small antiship missiles as well.
Keep in mind that some of the Houthi drones are not “child’s toy” but a significant fraction of the size of a real aircraft, or the size of a conventional missile, so they can carry a decent payload or warhead. It’s how they’re sinking merchant ships.
What is the difference between a loitering missile and a loitering drone? Is it that the latter has real-time control from a base?
The missile is usually totally or even mostly autonomous and was designed as an attack munition to begin with. A loitering drone need not have been intended as an attack vehicle but could collect information. Drones of this type can be fully manually piloted by remote or have some automation - we’re still not at the point where they can fly completely on their own just yet.
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