Someone once said that looking for a ship on the ocean is like trying to find your car keys in a field with a pair of binoculars.
Obviously this applies less to littoral waters (1.5 dimensional instead of 2 dimensions of open water) but still: how does scale factor into trying to task sea drones with hunter/killer roles?
Also, always worth pointing out that while tactical warfare is a technological battle — in which drones may indeed be superior — war is also a strategic, political act and as such the presence of large scary ships — even 250t ones — is often enough to achieve ones strategic aims.
Love that analogy. But on the topic of your final point - I agree with you, but I do think we're rapidly approaching the era where ships of this size will be difficult to defend from a mass drone strike, easily coordinated via a combined air/surface/submerged drone swarm.
At that point, the asymmetric reward of sinking one of those large scary ships is going to be irresistible for both state and non-state actors, specifically for those same strategic and political aims.
Or they just use Phalanx-like [0] close-range defensive aid suites which already exist?
Sure, that will consume a lot of bullets but swarms of defensive kamikaze drones will also get used up and need resupply. In which case the resupply ships themselves also become high-value targets.
I thought the Phalanx was exactly the type of defense system that drone swarms were more or less designed to penetrate. Sure, it can put out an unreasonable amount of lead (tungsten? uranium?) downrange but the number of disparate targets it can engage per second is actually quite limited. It's vulnerable to being swarmed.
I agree that a Phalanx can be swarmed but I'm having problems envisaging drone-on-drone attritional combat involving a capital ship lasting for vey long. If you (capital ship owner) are attacking a peer state it can probably afford to swarm you repeatedly over several days also throwing in plenty of additional standoff missiles, perhaps something ballistic, a sub or two, probably others I haven't thought of.
You'd probably get away with it handling intermittent Houthi attacks in the Red Sea but in a serious war I think the logistics would get you in the end.
There are multiple different drones. I bet phalanx will do nothing against small 10" drones which can target communications and sensors of the ship in a first wave. And second wave could have much heavier payload to target ship's structure
The person you're responding to basically says that “big ships won't be cost effective against small droneship” but they fail to realize that these “small” droneship themselves must be pretty bulky if they want to carry a warhead big enough to destroy a big ship at long distance, and they will be pretty cost-effectively be dealt with by much smaller kamikaze drones that will be protecting the big ships.
> Someone once said that looking for a ship on the ocean is like trying to find your car keys in a field with a pair of binoculars.
That is true if you try to look for a ship visually. But nobody would do that. Everyone uses radar. The radar can be mounted on the shore, on a rig, on a ship, on an airplane, or on a satellite.
Or you use underwater microphones. Those can be mounted on the ocean floor, or a ship, or a submarine.
Neither of these share much with looking for your car keys with a pair of binoculars. The keys don't emit sound and the field does not transfer the sound as well as oceans do it. And the keys don't light up as nicely as a ship on a radar image. So i'm not sure what aspect of maritime surveillance does that saying illuminate.
Just based on the wikipedia page it doesn't sound like it was lost?
"After the ship's seizure the Malta Maritime Authority stated that the security committee—composed of Maltese, Finnish and Swedish authorities—were aware of the ship's location at all times, but withheld the information to protect the crew."
Certainly a murky situation but doesn't feel like it demonstrates the complexity of finding a ship. Sounds like right away once someone wanted to find the ship they could find the ship no problem. Presumably using Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites and then the frigate's own radar.
> how does scale factor into trying to task sea drones with hunter/killer roles?
The Black Sea is a good example of how that went down; using US intelligence - could be sattelite imagery, radar, or a combination thereof - they were able to pinpoint the Russian ship(s), giving their drone ships enough guidance to head there. And as long as there's no signal jamming, it could be remote controlled to its final destination if needs be.
Obviously this applies less to littoral waters (1.5 dimensional instead of 2 dimensions of open water) but still: how does scale factor into trying to task sea drones with hunter/killer roles?
Also, always worth pointing out that while tactical warfare is a technological battle — in which drones may indeed be superior — war is also a strategic, political act and as such the presence of large scary ships — even 250t ones — is often enough to achieve ones strategic aims.