The change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles. The cost of a “good enough” drone and missile is now so low that opponents of the US can simply build the thing faster than the US can build and deliver them. In effect the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised.
This is also true of airplanes. The point is you choose where you launch your drones from anywhere in the world.
> change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles
It's a return to battleship economics. Except instead of direct fire from and onto shores, you have indirect fire via drones. Unlike shells, however, we have anti-drone capabilities on the horizon.
It's silly to assume the current instability will persist for more than a few years. If the U.S. were paying any attention to Ukraine, it shouldn't have persisted until even now.
> the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised
Really not seeing the argument. Again, being able to build and launch and being able to field drones–alongside other weapons–is night and day. (Note that all of these arguments were made when missiles first dawned, too. Drones are, in many respects, a missile for area denial.)
You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes.
But you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less. Especially when your supply chain can only produce hundreds of interceptors per year and your adversary makes that many missiles per month and 10x that many drones per month.
To be clear, there is zero historic evidence—going back to the Blitz—that strategic bombing has ever been able to do any of these things.
Except the one about choke points. That isn’t strategic. It’s tactical. And using artillery or airpower for shaping operations absolutely works.
> you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less
Agree. Fortunately, the MIC seems to have recognized this. None of it fundamentally changes the value of carriers. It just means they need to be defended differently from before. Sort of how you can’t sent lone carriers out into the ocean, they have to be escorted.
I'm also not aware of a single case in history where a massive bombing campaign from a hostile country resulted in an immediate populist uprising and a regime change that favored that aggressor country. Having your city bombed for weeks on end tends to cause people to shelter where they can, worry solely about how they will survive the wreckage, and bond with their fellow citizens.
The fact that an air campaign and magical thinking was the complete game plan from trump and hegseth shows how utterly unqualified they are for the positions they have.
Not quite. It is hard to build an airplane, it is easy to build a drone. So if the battle comes to who is going to send more drones, then a big carrier will lose: it doesn't have a factory to build drones.
The real economics of battleships (and their precursor ships of the line) were:
Given expensive armaments (cannon), it is cheaper to concentrate these on a mobile platform that can geographically reposition itself than build / deploy / supply equivalent power everywhere, and the former allows for local overmatch.
Sufficiently cheap and powerful unmanned guided munitions (drones, cheap cruise/ballistic missiles, UAV/USV/UUVs) are a fundamentally different balance of power, especially with enough range.
What does make sense is a return to cheaper escort carriers, where the carrier should be as cheap as possible (preferably unmanned) as the platforms it hosts are no longer exquisite.
The launch of drones and missiles could be completely automated and there would be no need for the complex maintenance of reusable airplanes, so such carriers would need only a much smaller crew.
https://www.militarytimes.com/industry/techwatch/2026/03/31/...
There is definitely an argument to be made that even APKWS is too expensive due to the cost of flying a F16 per hour, but it’s not at the level of a few million dollar missile.
Obviously the US was in no way prepared for the Iranian response, but it’s not like zero development has happened in the last few years. It’s far too slow, but it’s deployed and in active use in combat. Hopefully this will be a wake up call that military procurement and domestic manufacturing needs to be wholesale reconfigured with breakneck speed. Doubtful though without much more pain felt directly by American citizens.
These weapons have been around since the early 2010s, they aren't new, and have been deployed in the Middle East for many years. They were literally designed for killing swarms of Shahed-style drones.
Or, that is their advertised capabilities. Countries that buy them usually complain that they don't work as well on practice.
You can destroy 16 drones every 2 minutes. If you get attacked by 50 drones, you'll get 16-20 of them. Did that help you?
I mean, they are helpful (if they work as well as the marketing material says). Just not transformative or sufficient.
At a guess, I assume much of the scale of carriers is tied to the logistics of air power, which are considerably less relevant in drone warfare. Carriers will always remain useful for more accurate strikes and operating aircraft that work at higher altitudes, but this broadside idea of volume might work better on a platform that scales better instead of the huge and expensive carrier footprint.
The size of the ship has little bearing on the visibility of it to sensors. You should also consider that it is much more difficult to sink a large ship than a small ship.
An important variable missing from your calculus is distance from munitions factory/supply depot. There are far cheaper and scalable ways to deliver tons of explosives if your supply lines are short, such as rail when you're defending your homeland. Carrier groups are both transport and FOBs
> You should also consider that it is much more difficult to sink a large ship than a small ship.
How did that turn out for the Russian Black Sea flagship, the Moskva?
So you'd say, OK, what drones can we launch from the tiny fiberglass-hulled small craft that we can build lots of, but the issue is that such drones will be very small and will necessarily have ineffectively small payloads to suit.
I'm just saying that a carrier is probably the wrong footprint for something that serves up drones.
If you are the big boy with the bigger gun you don't necessarily need that.
PS: I will take that back when someone manages to hit a carrier with a low cost drone boat.
Where? When?
> if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone
What are you referring to? The entire modern carrier strike group is architected around using stand-off weapons to clear threats to make way for stand-in weapons. The relevant ranges are what your stand-in bombers can hit without re-fuelling versus with. The era of direct firing from ships passed ages ago–that doesn't make carriers less valuable, just changes their role.
Contrary to popular belief, an aircraft carrier does more than just launch airplane. Its optimal deployment zone will be defined by the range of its helicopters. So not as far as you think.
Take the helicopters out and you have easily 50% less missions this thing can launch per day.
The USS Plunkett? A destroyer, not a carrier, that sustained the best the Germans could throw at her and kept on going; earning 5 battle stars while participating in all the major allied invasions in europe. What part was the tragedy of her? That she was scrapped in 1975 instead of being turned into a museum?
Traditional anti-shipping missiles are a bigger danger.
The optimal deployment zone is far off shore, and there its very hard to reach.
Is your point that you can put a huge carrier literally in the straits?
Antiship missiles carry larger warheads, often double the size, and deliver that warhead deep inside a warship where it is much more vulnerable. A shahed blowing up on a carrier deck will be upsetting but won't do much. With particularly egregious negligence of standard US Navy damage control methodology, you might cause a lot of damage by fire, like what happened to the Ford. Not that I'm suggesting it was hit by a Shahed.
There's a plethora of various low cost systems being developed for some defence, but the assumption I always see on HN and elsewhere is that for some reason cheap offensive drones will just never have a countermeasure...which isn't how any of this works (exhibit A: massed infantry assaults can sometimes work against emplaced machine guns, but in general the machine gun was the end of that tactic).
There is absolutely no reason that the current disruption drones are causing should lead to some sustained power imbalance: if you don't have the big laser today that's one thing, but if tomorrow you're scoring 100% intercept rates against the same threat then how cheap it is doesn't matter anymore. And there's no particular reason to think that won't be the case (if a cheap drone can be on the offensive, you'd have to present a very good case why the interceptor cannot be built in similar quantities at which point you're back to high end systems deciding the day).
What are ours doing during this war?
This is a categorically false assertion that they have been putting to assuage their local populations - which are heavily opposed to the war and the US support. Maybe not all of them, but some of them, like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, are clearly hosting and allowing the US to prosecute the war from their soil. If they weren't, you wouldn't have had the AWACS aircraft getting turned to smithereens in Riyadh.
It’s perhaps a distinction without a difference but it’s the line that appears to have been currently drawn.