[Travis McGee]

The Houthis are doing the US Navy a HUGE favor.

At fairly low cost, they are demonstrating to the world, and the US Navy, the embarrassing obsolescence of our naval force and its weapons.

Trading million dollar missiles for $20K drones and $100k missiles is a losing equation, when our best ships only carry two dozen of the million dollar missiles, and then have to leave the theater for a friendly theater dockside reload.

This is a favor because it’s better to learn this now, rather than learning it like the Prince of Wales and Repulse discovered as Singapore fell.

The US Navy is MORE obsolete in 2024 than battleships were in 1940.

Please thank the Houthis. This is much cheaper than losing aircraft carriers in the first weeks of a Taiwan intervention, for example.

[kiryandil]

Yes, our resident Ukie trolls are having a blast yukking it up about “The Battle of the Black Sea”, as if the lessons don’t apply elsewhere.

[hardspunned]

We are most definitely not getting a trillion dollars a year worth of value from the MIC. As usual, we are more than ready to fight the last war.

[Paul R.]

To some extent I agree with you, but a lot of the problem is not at the individual battle level. EVERY ship that's been hit has been an undefended merchant ship. The Houthis have yet to demonstrate they can hit a US warship, much less sink one. Granted that if we give them enough tries, at some point there will be a human or technical error on our part. Then we'll see how our damage and fire control parties work, but the most recent evidence is that they are quite good. Merchant ships are a much different matter, as they are not manned nor trained to deal with missile hits.

The Russians? Give me a break. For one thing, their fire control sucks. That ship B4 last that they lost to sea-drone attacks -- did you see the vid? They continued shooting at a clearly disabled drone (was just going around in circles) while another drone came past it and tagged their ship. Sailors were shooting hand-held rifles at the drones, too. I am not impressed.

Nonetheless, what are WE doing wrong? Plenty.

First, we've not built nearly enough AD destroyers, and we should have a pack of AD Frigates too. Small, fast, screen ships, drone hunters, etc... The list of what's needed isn't short! Mind you, this is not to put them, say, off Yemen for several years. They are for task force defense and short term defense of an area / sea lane.

In both cases you still have to expeditiously take care of the problem at its root. In this case, you "convince" Iran to no longer be sending the Houthis anything more than food. A repeat of Operation Praying Mantis would likely do the trick.

For that, and a lot more, our current strike capabilities in most regards are NOT obsolete, and in fact are quite good. The problem is to add more defenses to them, which requires reversing our long decline in defense spending as a % of GDP. Even with Trump, we barely did better than break even. In this new world of the 2020's and beyond, if we can't get defense spending back up to around 4% of GDP, we are probably hosed.

Lots of new systems and approaches needed...