Feels like the title needs some sort of "2002" notice - the reporting is recent but the actual wargame was done in 2002 and only recently declassified.
So, of course, the US military's vulnerability has only increased in spades since 2002 due to drones. All those bases in the Middle East that were supposed to help protect the countries where they were based were just ripe targets.
I think more critically, most of the US Navy feels like it's now more for show than an actual fighting force. A new aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion unit cost, but $120 billion total program cost. An Iranian Shahed drone costs about $35,000. So at about 2-3% of just the unit cost of an aircraft carrier, I could buy 10,000 Shahed drones. I don't even know how an aircraft carrier would begin to defend itself against an onslaught of thousands of drones.
In the joke of "Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses", clearly the 100 duck-sized horses is the winning strategy.
A Shahed is only useful against stationary soft targets, which an aircraft carrier is not. It also doesn’t have the kind of heavy warhead or terminal guidance required to defeat the armored structure of naval ships. Shahed doesn’t have any kind of countermeasure avoidance. Adding these would massively increase the cost.
Naval anti-ship drones have been around for many decades. This is a highly evolved area of military technology with a long history of real-world engagements upon which to base design choices.
The standard naval anti-ship drones are Harpoon, Exocet, and similar. These are qualitatively more capable than a Shahed and you still need a swarm of them to get through.
"The standard naval anti-ship drones are Harpoon, Exocet, and similar. These are qualitatively more capable than a Shahed "
Those are called guided rockets and of course are more capable but also way more expensive.
Shaheds can and did get basic guidance very cheap. Add a video, basic image processing to find big grey object in sea as target, send them radio controlled in the right direction .. so when they get jammed, they autonomously find that big target.
And you surely can blind/shoot down a couple. But we were talking about 10000 of them at once. The carrier would maybe not sink, but it would burn.
Ok, if there are really 10000 in a attack at once, I am pretty sure a carrier would burn so much, it is basically scrap metal. But I suppose 1000 already, or even 100 at once would be a serious threat with grave damage. I suppose we will find out sooner or later.
And now the cost has increased again, because you need to field enough simultaneous launches to get 10k in the air at the same time. It doesn’t mean you need 10k launchers, but you still need a lot
If your aircraft carrier is mobility kill what are you even doing? These things operate in a group with supporting vessels for a reason. Never mind that the point of a carrier is that its air group can reach out pretty far so you don't have to drive where the mines are.
I feel like this and many other responses are missing the point, e.g. focusing on the specifics of a current Shahed drone.
My main thesis is that the cost of small autonomous drones have dropped enormously over the past 20 years, and that increasingly drone swarms look like a much more capable and cost effective way of waging war than giant, incredibly expensive, slow moving targets. These giant but powerful machines (not just aircraft carriers but also things like tanks) are simply poorly suited to the future (and maybe even the present) of warfare.
> My main thesis is that the cost of small autonomous drones have dropped enormously over the past 20 years, and that increasingly drone swarms look like a much more capable and cost effective way of waging war
And how about the cost of drone countermeasures? Ukrainian interceptor drones are already a fraction of the price of a Shahed, and drone jamming systems are evolving at a lightning pace. Every weapon development seems like an unstoppable game changer until an effective defense is widely fielded, but that defense does tend to wind up getting fielded, or the offensive technology is completely superseded, by the time the next major conflict breaks out.
In the current Iran conflict not a single US warship has been damaged by a drone or similar system. Iran is among the leaders in drone technologies and started the war with a substantial stockpile. The US navy had not previously gone up against an adversary in the drone age and all of its ships were designed prior to the start of the Ukraine war. If there was ever a time where a large number of drones could overwhelm a ship with inappropriate defenses, it would have been then. In 5 years there isn't going to be a combat vessel in any first rate navy without dedicated counter-drone defenses and every officer will be well versed in counter-drone tactics. The best drones in the hands of the most experienced units may still be able to defeat these countermeasures, but the idea that you're going to overwhelm an aircraft carrier with 10,000 cheap drones is a fantasy.
And yet the U.S. navy is unable to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has no reason to take down a U.S. ship. In fact, it will try and avoid it as much as possible because taking down a ship would be an insult the U.S. would have to respond to with an incredible escalation of violence.
The purpose of the Shahed drones arsenal right now is to allow Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz, which it is achieving despite many promises/threats by the U.S. to wrest control from Iran, and to economically damage the US’s partners in the Middle East so they contribute pressuring the U.S. to end the war.
> These giant but powerful machines (not just aircraft carriers but also things like tanks) are simply poorly suited to the future (and maybe even the present) of warfare.
There's a whole new generation of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks being designed and metal bended right now with that very threat in mind.
Not to mention tons of short range air defense supporting systems.
Modern Shaheds can be controlled through satellite links like StarLink, with high quality video. Also, targeting a large pile of metal in the sea should not be difficult with something like a radar.
Any kind of radio control should be discounted when attacking a US carrier fleet, they will just be jammed.
Autonomous optically guided missiles/drones would fare better, but those are still vulnerable to being blinded by laser systems like HELIOS[0], and of course being shot down by anti air missiles or CIWS.
This underestimates the requirements. It requires sophisticated real-time terminal guidance. This is not a cheap feature. Modern anti-ship drones dynamically select a precise point of impact based on their observation of the target to maximize probability of hitting a vulnerable spot. Especially with a weak warhead like the Shahed, most points of impact would be scratching the paint.
The model you are talking about was basically how things worked in the 1970s. Technology has improved a lot over the last half century.
For now only the USA has reliable access to anything like Starlink / Starshield. Radar isn't any kind of magic solution: it has limited range and field of view.
I'm not sure a carrier strike group would actually outright lose to a giant swarm of drones, at least in terms of the carrier being sunk. A Shahed warhead is pretty small once you're using it against large warships.
That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night. It feels like the latter strategy would be more effective, saturating air defenses and what have you, but it doesn't seem to be used much. Maybe launching that many drones at roughly the same time is really hard?
You don't need to sink a carrier to make it more of a liability than an asset.
If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.
> That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks
To some degree, this happens. Journalists reporting from Ukraine already talk about some nights being silent, and then there are strikes with 600 drones or so. On the other side, Ukraine was really effective at using naval drone swarms to attack Russian naval ships.
Why not send even bigger swarm? I guess there are limits to how many drones you can effectively control at once. Data links saturate, and you risk losing a big swarm to jamming.
When Russia really wants to destroy a target in Ukraine, they use ballistic missiles, their interception rate is pretty low. Ukraine seems also pretty effective at destroying things in Russia, so air defense doesn't seem to be such a huge obstacle.
Finally, it feels like the Russia-Ukraine war is turning more and more into an economic battle. Ukraine is now at the point where money is more limited than weapons / ammunition, at least for some types of weaponry. Would saving up drones for a huge wave be a big economic advantage?
> If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.
Both of these statements are wrong. Carriers generally rely on the radar systems of their escorts and their early warning aircraft much more than their own systems.
Similarly, even if the landing deck was damaged, again the carrier's escorts are its primary defense
True, but if you can't land planes, then you can only launch each plane once.
But I have a suspicion that the US navy practices damage control and recovery. Repairing a landing deck seems like a thing they would practice very extensively.
> "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night.
There are real technical limitations to operating large numbers of drones simultaneously. They are competing with eachother for bandwidth, and the more you squeeze in the weaker they all become to jamming. You need to coordinate larger teams with more resources to operate lots of drones all at once, rather than resupplying smaller teams periodically. Once you have enough drones flying toward a target to survive the defenses, any additional drones are wasted; and for the moment most air defenses are either too expensive or too limited in the number of targets they can simultaneously handle to require large swarms. Smaller numbers of more capable drones can outperform larger numbers of cheaper drones - 1 drone with an 80% chance of neutralizing the target might be cheaper than 2 drones which individually have a 50% chance for a total of 75%; and 2 such drones beat 5 cheap ones. Finally, big attacks are more likely to be detected, either prior to the attack by espionage or while in transit by radar and other sensors - minimizing the time that defenses have to respond or for targets to flee can be much more advantageous than having an extra munition.
All around you want the minimum necessary to get the job done.
I don't think they are fully automated in Ukraine vs Russia. For an onslaught you'd need to either have a lot of pilots, full automation or some in between of like 1 pilot controls one drone but another set of 10 drones fly in formation with the pilot and will self destruct hitting the same target the pilot flew into, but I'm not sure software for this exists yet.
A carrier is nearly impossible to sink. However, a bunch of flaming jet fuel sloshing around a big bathtub with thousands of americans on it is effectively as disastrous.
Ukraine does save up their strike drones. They only launch major strikes on defended targets every week of so. Russia is increasingly running out of air defense systems in many regions.
Russia also does this, with both drones and missiles. It also sends cheap decoys mixed in with the Shaheds, because it turns out they're not as cheap and plentiful as people think, especially when you're trying to hit hard targets.
It is about force projection though. Ok, you have a bunch of drones in the US, now how do you use them to attack Iran or in the pacific theatre?
Yes, aircraft carriers aren't nearly as unstoppable as they were in WWII, but they are still the most versatile mobile platforms the world has for projecting force around the globe.
This was the Millennium Challenge, which was leaked to the press in the early 2000s. I remember reading about it in 2006 in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, as an example of the power of intuition and rapidly-shifting command & control lines.
I totally agree with the rest of your post. The U.S. military now feels like the British Navy in the inter-war years, where they had massive battlecruisers like HMS Hood that were completely spotless, the pride of the British Navy, but also completely unsuited for combat and blew up the first time they saw it.
Also the wargame was flawed because the computer simulations in 2002 allowed the enemy general to put anti-ship missiles bigger than speed boats on the speed boats, and basically 'spawn' the speed boats almost next to the blue fleet.
Also apparently the motorcycle carriers were modeled as having no delay which gave them flawless realtime communications....
How exactly would you deploy 10,000 drones? If you start thinking about the logistics of it (you need to store them somewhere, somebody needs to bring them from the storage and prepare them for launch, somebody needs to navigate them, ...), you will quickly realize that you budget is not as big as you would like.
I don't think it's clearly established that 10,000 Shahed drones would actually be a threat to an aircraft carrier though.
Remember that 10k drones can't just be conjured into the air all at once or act with perfect coordination. There are operational limitations that prevent effectiveness from scaling up past a certain point.
The after action report was only recently declassified. This war game has been pretty widely publicized. Especially after the retired marine general that ran the OPFOR complained about it being rigged.
This seems like precisely the opposite rhetoric our navy uses to procure funds, and is certainly the opposite strategy we have used to build the navy. It feels like we somehow got trapped forty years in the past
On January 17, 1961, in this farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."
In a speech of less than 10 minutes, on January 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his political farewell to the American people on national television from the Oval Office of the White House.
Those who expected the military leader and hero of World War II to depart his Presidency with a nostalgic, "old soldier" speech like Gen. Douglas MacArthur's, were surprised at his strong warnings about the dangers of the "military-industrial complex."
Does that even matter? US GDP is orders of magnitude larger than Iran. The American way of war has long been based on minimizing casualties through overwhelming materiel superiority and profligate ammunition expenditure. Back in WWII the USA literally out produced Japan by 1000:1 in some types of munitions. Our industrial base has decayed a bit lately but that's a fixable problem.
It matters in so far as the production rate for e.g. air defense interceptors is much lower than the rate at which they've been used in the Iran war. Which is probably one of the reasons the US was ready for a ceasefire.
They might have enough stockpiles to continue this war for a while, but it thins out the capabilities in other theaters, making the US generally more vulnerable.
800 Patriot missiles were used within the first 3 days in the Iran war. This is greater than the total number of Patriot missiles received by Ukraine during the entire war with Russia.
The USA is rapidly depleting it's missile stocks, and the Orange president is displaying some funny priorities.
> The Red force, led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, used numerous asymmetrical tactics unanticipated by the Blue force; a pre-emptive cruise missile attack sank sixteen Blue warships and led to the exercise's suspension. The simulation was restarted with Blue forces fully restored, and Red forces heavily constrained from free-play "to the point where the end state was scripted"
More of a political exercise than anything else. But this has been cited as an indication of the effectiveness of modern drone-based warfare.
Because the point of the wargame is that it's a training exercise for everyone involved, right down to the crews of the ships involved, not an nfl game. If the free-play portion ends up not exercising a bunch of expected scenarios because of an unexpected tactic, it would be monumentally wasteful to not make a note of the lesson and then reset with a script.
Well in the recent Iran war they kept their major ships far from Iran and didn't try to do any major operations in the area where small Iranian boats like those used in the wargame would be a threat. Indeed none of the vulnerabilities exposed by the Millennium Challenge were actual issues in the recent conflict. Whether that means the lesson was learned or the red team tactics were exploiting issues specific to the wargame is not clear.
They have sang lalalala with their fingers in their ears instead of noting the lesson, and it still would have been a monumental waste to not reset and continue the exercise.
One thing to consider is that Van Riper summoned assets unrealistically he used small boats to avoid detection but then attributed load outs that they couldn't realistically carry.
He also moved information unrealistically assuming that his units could communicate as efficently with paper moved by hand as they could with radios.
There are real, valid criticisms of the lessons we should have learned from the exercise, but it's not as simple as most analyses make it out to be.
Have there really been no other more interesting war games in the last quarter-century, or did all the negative attention this got just result in us never hearing about another one?
There have been far more interesting war games in the last quarter century.[0]
This one shows the the US narrowly winning against China in a conflict over Taiwan. The US wins but with tremendous losses -- specifically in the form many munitions that take years to decades to replace.
And it just so happens that we witnessed a conflict play out just a few months ago and that resulted in a similar depletion of munitions albeit with minimal losses of American ships and aircraft.
What's very troubling about this is that in response the US moved munitions from the pacific into the middle east, leaving Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in a very vulnerable position.
This may explain why the current US president was unusually obsequious to the leader of China when in the past he had been particularly bellicose.
Also, cool fact: While researching this subject I learned that the engines for most American cruise missiles come from a single company.[1]
"Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel.
Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected."
Even high tech drone and DF missiles also America will 100% lose. Why? No rare earth and magnets. Consistently dreaming of past glories like fighting Japanese in Midway and fighting Saddam. Remember USA lost to goat herders. I am 100% sure those Talebans have no J10C or Oreshnik missiles.
We're still vulnerable to low tech warfare. We keep developing expensive systems that can't be manufactured quickly. One of the main reasons for success in WW2 was the fact that we could produce decent weapons in great volume. Japan had limited resources (draw a parallel to our rare earth situation). Germany had many advanced weapons, but couldn't produce enough (draw a parallel to our missiles).
We could because we had an industrial base that knew how to make stuff, not MBAs with delusions of grandeur who are belatedly discovering that they are easily dispensed with once the Chinese have acquired the manufacturing know-how.
We reacted to this late. But it isn’t a coïncidence that low-cost munitions are now receiving, in the U.S., other countries’ decadeslong weapons budgets.
"The simulated U.S. Navy battle group was defeated in ten minutes by an enemy that launched its attacks from commercial ships and using other unconventional means.
The findings of the newly released postmortem from the $250 million Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise foreshadowed “the very challenges the United States would face in... other conflicts since then,” according to Jones, who is FOIA director at the Post."
The details may have been classified, but I had read about the conclusion of the exercise back then, shortly before the Iraq War. Fortunately, Saddam's generals were not as competent and resourceful as General Van Riper USMC.
I keep wondering if this is a preview of the future. If I were a nation state looking to initiate hostilities, how "easy" it would be to have a handful of kamikaze drones discretely built and distributed around juicy targets.
Radar, AA, expensive jets, core infrastructure. All attacked as part of an opening salvo which could cripple the enemy's forces on the first day.
The US learnt this lesson over 80 years ago with the simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbour, Guam, Wake, Midway and the Philippines.
The difference is these days satellite surveillance makes it harder to secretly move military forces into place. Drone carrying cargo ships is the biggest risk.
Iran doesn't have real-time spy satellites and Starlink. it can only launch their shitty shaheds at stationary targets in impotent rage like Russia does.
>the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom on 7 October 2001, alongside the United Kingdom. The two countries were later joined by a large multinational force, made up of multiple NATO members and two of their major non-NATO allies, as well as Afghanistan's local Northern Alliance. The invasion effort made rapid progress for the next two months as the coalition captured Kabul on 13 November and toppled the Taliban by 17 December, after which international military bases were set up near major cities across the country.
>13 killed (including 1 CIA officer and 4 non-combat deaths)[11]
if that was not a decisive victory, then I don't know what is.
the rest of the so-called war was a low intensity insurgency during 20 years of which the US lost fewer soldiers than Russia loses in 20 hours.
and a not inconsiderable amount of US PMC pork barrelling, related lobbying, contracts and business.
It's not nothing, and it seems that the scale of such things are enough to impact decisions and directions and lead to long low level churn with no particular outcome.
War game is not needed. The war with Iran has already proven that a relatively tiny but sophisticated opponent can have massive asymmetric impact on USA.
Relatively tiny? It is a 92 million person organisation with a 1.7 trillion dollar turnover, 2500+ years of continuous operations and covering an area 1/6th the size of USA.
I see it repeated a lot, but Iran is not a direct descendent of some Persian empire, it was conquered by Greeks, Arabs, Turks and Mongols and ruled by Arabs and Turks for most of its history.
These nationalist myths are not taken seriously for western countries but that criticism usually does not extend to foreign myths
What is cultural continuity? Is France, a far more coherent nation is cultural continuous to the Gauls? Even though completely subjugated by the Romans?
Is the Islamic Republic more culturally similar to the Arab Khalifate it professes to emulate or Cyrus?
Also you brought up Sumer, how is Iran related to Sumer more than it is related to the actual Mesopotamian empires? I never heard someone claim that
I never said that. I said Susa/Sush, the beginning of Iranian civilization, is nearly as old as Sumer, by about 500 years. Historians generally consider Sumer the oldest true civilization, even if there are older settlements that didn't rise to the level of complexity rating as civilization.
Being occupied by foreign powers doesn't break cultural continuity, otherwise you'd claim the modern Greeks don't have continuity with ancient Athens, despite speaking the same language.
Continuity also doesn't mean being static. Modern Greek is not the same as classical Attic. Modern Greeks are Christian, not again, and so on.
Yes, the context however is not cultural continuity but national continuity. When someone claims Iran is bound to win because of 2500 years of empire, that seems like a joke considering the amount of foreign rule it endured.
Some hermetic cultural continuity except for language is also doubtful, Iran culture is grounded in Arabian culture no less than it is grounded in Persian culture. Hence the entire national unifying concept of Islamic Republic and heir to the Khalifates.
Regarding Susa, as far as I understand they haven't spoken an Indo-European language and Elamite is not related to Persian at all, so why do you think it shows cultural continuity?
Ok. tiny might have been a stretch but Iran spends $10B a year on military compared to $900B for the US. Iran has 500 aircraft (pre conflict) vs 13,000 for US.
I think they know that the military is mostly a grift in spending at times of peace. It keeps the military and benefactors happy. the defense industry employs people , which helps with support for the military.
In times of war, they expect mobilization will mean different things.
But I don't think it works that way. You can't suddenly go low tech, the mindset and the skills pipeline can't just be developed within a few months. It doesn't matter how much willpower or money you have.
The way tech and warfare is going, it's a volume game. Both sides have drones, both sides have anti-drone systems. Which side can get enough drones past defenses to cause harm? Which side can keep producing enough drone swarms and sustain enormous casualties and keep fighting?
The new supply line is the one you need to keep drones fueled up, and within line-of-sight and other comms requirement boundaries, since the other guys will be jamming, and the deeper you string from further away, the more difficult the other guys will find it to fight back, or defend.
I focused in on drones/UAV, but I think it applies to all forms of warfare today. Not just UAV, but even infantry.
The US has been at war regularly for a long time now. On one hand, it means a well trained and prepared fighting force. On the other hand, what it takes to win a war against the US has been figured out by all its serious adversaries. Undermine its soft power, alienate it from its network of allies, and attack the political will of the American public. That last bit is how Korea, Afghanistan, and now Iran were a loss for the US. It goes for any country, it's never about the superiority of technology, or arms alone.
The Manhattan project didn't win the war in the pacific theater of the second world war for example, at least not ultimately. ultimately, the fact that the japanese leadership accepted that there would be more nukes, and that american leadership, and public alike are more than willing to keep killing hundreds of thousands of civilians did. All serious enemies of the US now know that they must get the american public on their side, or get the american public to simply not care about fighting them at such high costs.
I can't imagine a good way to solve that ultimate weakness...other than to reduce costs. Instead a million dollar UAV, use a $99 kimikaze UAV, and send 10k of them at a time, constant waves of attacks that are impossible to defend. demoralize and destabilize the enemy very quickly at low cost before opinions waver.
I only said all that purely for intellectual curiosity though. War is a filthy thing. There is no realistic prospect of homeland warfare for the US. I would prefer to not be prepared for war at all. A constant state of readiness for war is inviting war. It needs to be written into law that peacetime defense spending cannot exceed more than a certain portion of the GDP to national debt ratio, and never above like 1% of revenue.
The American populace would probably support a war if the American homeland was attacked. But American leaders would much rather project force elsewhere, which makes it hard to get the average American to buy into their schemes.
Feels like the title needs some sort of "2002" notice - the reporting is recent but the actual wargame was done in 2002 and only recently declassified.
So, of course, the US military's vulnerability has only increased in spades since 2002 due to drones. All those bases in the Middle East that were supposed to help protect the countries where they were based were just ripe targets.
I think more critically, most of the US Navy feels like it's now more for show than an actual fighting force. A new aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion unit cost, but $120 billion total program cost. An Iranian Shahed drone costs about $35,000. So at about 2-3% of just the unit cost of an aircraft carrier, I could buy 10,000 Shahed drones. I don't even know how an aircraft carrier would begin to defend itself against an onslaught of thousands of drones.
In the joke of "Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses", clearly the 100 duck-sized horses is the winning strategy.
A Shahed is only useful against stationary soft targets, which an aircraft carrier is not. It also doesn’t have the kind of heavy warhead or terminal guidance required to defeat the armored structure of naval ships. Shahed doesn’t have any kind of countermeasure avoidance. Adding these would massively increase the cost.
Naval anti-ship drones have been around for many decades. This is a highly evolved area of military technology with a long history of real-world engagements upon which to base design choices.
The standard naval anti-ship drones are Harpoon, Exocet, and similar. These are qualitatively more capable than a Shahed and you still need a swarm of them to get through.
"The standard naval anti-ship drones are Harpoon, Exocet, and similar. These are qualitatively more capable than a Shahed "
Those are called guided rockets and of course are more capable but also way more expensive.
Shaheds can and did get basic guidance very cheap. Add a video, basic image processing to find big grey object in sea as target, send them radio controlled in the right direction .. so when they get jammed, they autonomously find that big target.
And you surely can blind/shoot down a couple. But we were talking about 10000 of them at once. The carrier would maybe not sink, but it would burn.
> An Iranian Shahed drone costs about $35,000
If that's right, then 10000 would cost $350 million. That's a lot of money to spend to not sink a carrier.
Ok, if there are really 10000 in a attack at once, I am pretty sure a carrier would burn so much, it is basically scrap metal. But I suppose 1000 already, or even 100 at once would be a serious threat with grave damage. I suppose we will find out sooner or later.
And now the cost has increased again, because you need to field enough simultaneous launches to get 10k in the air at the same time. It doesn’t mean you need 10k launchers, but you still need a lot
Yeah, but those launchers are really cheap. Just a metal rail and a booster (and alternatives are possible, Iran has lots of steep mountains).
right, but like, 10,000 of them? that's a lot and only a small fraction of the cost of more capable systems of destroying an aircraft carrier
>A Shahed is only useful against stationary
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/18/russian-drone-hits-...
https://en.usm.media/chinese-vessel-comes-under-attack-in-th...
>or terminal guidance
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-shahed-dive-bomb-shah...
I can bankrupt you before running out of my arsenal of Shahed drones if you’re spending 1000 times the cost of a drone to bring it down.
The U.S. is incredibly rich but not that much richer.
Suppose the ship is immobilized or under tow after hitting a mine for example. Or even just in port in range of cheap dumb drones.
Basically these make it much more likely you loose ships if they stop moving for any reason.
If your aircraft carrier is mobility kill what are you even doing? These things operate in a group with supporting vessels for a reason. Never mind that the point of a carrier is that its air group can reach out pretty far so you don't have to drive where the mines are.
I feel like this and many other responses are missing the point, e.g. focusing on the specifics of a current Shahed drone.
My main thesis is that the cost of small autonomous drones have dropped enormously over the past 20 years, and that increasingly drone swarms look like a much more capable and cost effective way of waging war than giant, incredibly expensive, slow moving targets. These giant but powerful machines (not just aircraft carriers but also things like tanks) are simply poorly suited to the future (and maybe even the present) of warfare.
> My main thesis is that the cost of small autonomous drones have dropped enormously over the past 20 years, and that increasingly drone swarms look like a much more capable and cost effective way of waging war
And how about the cost of drone countermeasures? Ukrainian interceptor drones are already a fraction of the price of a Shahed, and drone jamming systems are evolving at a lightning pace. Every weapon development seems like an unstoppable game changer until an effective defense is widely fielded, but that defense does tend to wind up getting fielded, or the offensive technology is completely superseded, by the time the next major conflict breaks out.
In the current Iran conflict not a single US warship has been damaged by a drone or similar system. Iran is among the leaders in drone technologies and started the war with a substantial stockpile. The US navy had not previously gone up against an adversary in the drone age and all of its ships were designed prior to the start of the Ukraine war. If there was ever a time where a large number of drones could overwhelm a ship with inappropriate defenses, it would have been then. In 5 years there isn't going to be a combat vessel in any first rate navy without dedicated counter-drone defenses and every officer will be well versed in counter-drone tactics. The best drones in the hands of the most experienced units may still be able to defeat these countermeasures, but the idea that you're going to overwhelm an aircraft carrier with 10,000 cheap drones is a fantasy.
And yet the U.S. navy is unable to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has no reason to take down a U.S. ship. In fact, it will try and avoid it as much as possible because taking down a ship would be an insult the U.S. would have to respond to with an incredible escalation of violence.
The purpose of the Shahed drones arsenal right now is to allow Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz, which it is achieving despite many promises/threats by the U.S. to wrest control from Iran, and to economically damage the US’s partners in the Middle East so they contribute pressuring the U.S. to end the war.
Thats also something Iran is achieving.
> These giant but powerful machines (not just aircraft carriers but also things like tanks) are simply poorly suited to the future (and maybe even the present) of warfare.
There's a whole new generation of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks being designed and metal bended right now with that very threat in mind.
Not to mention tons of short range air defense supporting systems.
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Modern Shaheds can be controlled through satellite links like StarLink, with high quality video. Also, targeting a large pile of metal in the sea should not be difficult with something like a radar.
Any kind of radio control should be discounted when attacking a US carrier fleet, they will just be jammed.
Autonomous optically guided missiles/drones would fare better, but those are still vulnerable to being blinded by laser systems like HELIOS[0], and of course being shot down by anti air missiles or CIWS.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Energy_Laser_with_Integra...
This underestimates the requirements. It requires sophisticated real-time terminal guidance. This is not a cheap feature. Modern anti-ship drones dynamically select a precise point of impact based on their observation of the target to maximize probability of hitting a vulnerable spot. Especially with a weak warhead like the Shahed, most points of impact would be scratching the paint.
The model you are talking about was basically how things worked in the 1970s. Technology has improved a lot over the last half century.
For now only the USA has reliable access to anything like Starlink / Starshield. Radar isn't any kind of magic solution: it has limited range and field of view.
I'm not sure a carrier strike group would actually outright lose to a giant swarm of drones, at least in terms of the carrier being sunk. A Shahed warhead is pretty small once you're using it against large warships.
That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night. It feels like the latter strategy would be more effective, saturating air defenses and what have you, but it doesn't seem to be used much. Maybe launching that many drones at roughly the same time is really hard?
> at least in terms of the carrier being sunk
You don't need to sink a carrier to make it more of a liability than an asset.
If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.
> That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks
To some degree, this happens. Journalists reporting from Ukraine already talk about some nights being silent, and then there are strikes with 600 drones or so. On the other side, Ukraine was really effective at using naval drone swarms to attack Russian naval ships.
Why not send even bigger swarm? I guess there are limits to how many drones you can effectively control at once. Data links saturate, and you risk losing a big swarm to jamming.
When Russia really wants to destroy a target in Ukraine, they use ballistic missiles, their interception rate is pretty low. Ukraine seems also pretty effective at destroying things in Russia, so air defense doesn't seem to be such a huge obstacle.
Finally, it feels like the Russia-Ukraine war is turning more and more into an economic battle. Ukraine is now at the point where money is more limited than weapons / ammunition, at least for some types of weaponry. Would saving up drones for a huge wave be a big economic advantage?
> If you hit its radar systems and/or damage the surface enough that landing becomes impossible, it becomes a sitting duck.
Both of these statements are wrong. Carriers generally rely on the radar systems of their escorts and their early warning aircraft much more than their own systems.
Similarly, even if the landing deck was damaged, again the carrier's escorts are its primary defense
True, but if you can't land planes, then you can only launch each plane once.
But I have a suspicion that the US navy practices damage control and recovery. Repairing a landing deck seems like a thing they would practice very extensively.
I suppose there is an opportunity cost to saving up all your weapons. What is the enemy doing in that time where you stop throwing things at them?
Otherwise, what stopped them from saving up all the bullets, artillery, or bombs and sending them out in brief pulses in prior wars...
> "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night.
There are real technical limitations to operating large numbers of drones simultaneously. They are competing with eachother for bandwidth, and the more you squeeze in the weaker they all become to jamming. You need to coordinate larger teams with more resources to operate lots of drones all at once, rather than resupplying smaller teams periodically. Once you have enough drones flying toward a target to survive the defenses, any additional drones are wasted; and for the moment most air defenses are either too expensive or too limited in the number of targets they can simultaneously handle to require large swarms. Smaller numbers of more capable drones can outperform larger numbers of cheaper drones - 1 drone with an 80% chance of neutralizing the target might be cheaper than 2 drones which individually have a 50% chance for a total of 75%; and 2 such drones beat 5 cheap ones. Finally, big attacks are more likely to be detected, either prior to the attack by espionage or while in transit by radar and other sensors - minimizing the time that defenses have to respond or for targets to flee can be much more advantageous than having an extra munition.
All around you want the minimum necessary to get the job done.
I don't think they are fully automated in Ukraine vs Russia. For an onslaught you'd need to either have a lot of pilots, full automation or some in between of like 1 pilot controls one drone but another set of 10 drones fly in formation with the pilot and will self destruct hitting the same target the pilot flew into, but I'm not sure software for this exists yet.
A carrier is nearly impossible to sink. However, a bunch of flaming jet fuel sloshing around a big bathtub with thousands of americans on it is effectively as disastrous.
Ukraine does save up their strike drones. They only launch major strikes on defended targets every week of so. Russia is increasingly running out of air defense systems in many regions.
Russia also does this, with both drones and missiles. It also sends cheap decoys mixed in with the Shaheds, because it turns out they're not as cheap and plentiful as people think, especially when you're trying to hit hard targets.
It is about force projection though. Ok, you have a bunch of drones in the US, now how do you use them to attack Iran or in the pacific theatre?
Yes, aircraft carriers aren't nearly as unstoppable as they were in WWII, but they are still the most versatile mobile platforms the world has for projecting force around the globe.
Projection works up until someone calls the bluff, just like Iran did.
Projection always "works". If someone drives a car into a lake the car wasn't the problem.
This was the Millennium Challenge, which was leaked to the press in the early 2000s. I remember reading about it in 2006 in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, as an example of the power of intuition and rapidly-shifting command & control lines.
I totally agree with the rest of your post. The U.S. military now feels like the British Navy in the inter-war years, where they had massive battlecruisers like HMS Hood that were completely spotless, the pride of the British Navy, but also completely unsuited for combat and blew up the first time they saw it.
Also the wargame was flawed because the computer simulations in 2002 allowed the enemy general to put anti-ship missiles bigger than speed boats on the speed boats, and basically 'spawn' the speed boats almost next to the blue fleet.
Also apparently the motorcycle carriers were modeled as having no delay which gave them flawless realtime communications....
How exactly would you deploy 10,000 drones? If you start thinking about the logistics of it (you need to store them somewhere, somebody needs to bring them from the storage and prepare them for launch, somebody needs to navigate them, ...), you will quickly realize that you budget is not as big as you would like.
I don't think it's clearly established that 10,000 Shahed drones would actually be a threat to an aircraft carrier though.
Remember that 10k drones can't just be conjured into the air all at once or act with perfect coordination. There are operational limitations that prevent effectiveness from scaling up past a certain point.
Hasn't this always been the case? A hmmv vs random ieds. A tank vs a bunch of shoulder-mount rpgs. etc.
The after action report was only recently declassified. This war game has been pretty widely publicized. Especially after the retired marine general that ran the OPFOR complained about it being rigged.
There are 3 aircraft carriers near iran. Iran has multiple 10,000 of shahed drones.
> I don't even know how an aircraft carrier would begin to defend itself against an onslaught of thousands of drones.
$13 billion dollar military toybox?
Let’s think.
EMP.
Nets.
Defensive Drones.
Superdome.
Finding the solution isn’t hard - choosing and implementing it takes time when you’re a stumbling behemoth.
> Finding the solution isn’t hard
Finding a solution isn't hard until your adversary adjusts their tacts slightly and bypasses it a week later
Right.
So, better be Agile, and have segmented groups doing really different things in different regions,
not taking 10-25 years to develop new overpriced platforms
while World Wars are being fought on DJI.
This seems like precisely the opposite rhetoric our navy uses to procure funds, and is certainly the opposite strategy we have used to build the navy. It feels like we somehow got trapped forty years in the past
> somehow
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
On January 17, 1961, in this farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."
In a speech of less than 10 minutes, on January 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his political farewell to the American people on national television from the Oval Office of the White House.
Those who expected the military leader and hero of World War II to depart his Presidency with a nostalgic, "old soldier" speech like Gen. Douglas MacArthur's, were surprised at his strong warnings about the dangers of the "military-industrial complex."
I suppose everyone is going to want some really good goggles before they turn on some laser based CIWS replacement!
Right. It’s a $10+ billion dollar asset.
Melty-laser systems look cheap, compared to losing that even once.
what is a superdome?
Giant metal cover, maybe like an eyelid.
See also: NFL stadiums in the US
This is like if Inspector Gadget were responsible for defense countermeasures.
It was last on the list for a reason, lmao ^_^
Also, it’s not even a bad idea.
What, is it too heavy?
And yet, in a recent conflict of the US navy vs swarms of drones, no ships were lost.
> no ships were lost
how much ammunition did the US navy use to shoot down incoming drones, and what are the cost of those vs the attacker's cost?
Does that even matter? US GDP is orders of magnitude larger than Iran. The American way of war has long been based on minimizing casualties through overwhelming materiel superiority and profligate ammunition expenditure. Back in WWII the USA literally out produced Japan by 1000:1 in some types of munitions. Our industrial base has decayed a bit lately but that's a fixable problem.
It matters in so far as the production rate for e.g. air defense interceptors is much lower than the rate at which they've been used in the Iran war. Which is probably one of the reasons the US was ready for a ceasefire.
They might have enough stockpiles to continue this war for a while, but it thins out the capabilities in other theaters, making the US generally more vulnerable.
This absolutely matters. It is not 1945, and we used years of supplies.
If the decaying industrial base is that easy to fix please, by all means; go ahead and do it.
I don’t think you can fix it without long term, competent industrial policy and we have the absolute opposite of that in power currently.
> Does that even matter?
Yes.
800 Patriot missiles were used within the first 3 days in the Iran war. This is greater than the total number of Patriot missiles received by Ukraine during the entire war with Russia.
The USA is rapidly depleting it's missile stocks, and the Orange president is displaying some funny priorities.
The sound of a shifting goalpost.
The statement being responded to was effectively that the carrier is indefensible, and that is clearly not the case.
[dead]
I thought this was common knowledge?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
> The Red force, led by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, used numerous asymmetrical tactics unanticipated by the Blue force; a pre-emptive cruise missile attack sank sixteen Blue warships and led to the exercise's suspension. The simulation was restarted with Blue forces fully restored, and Red forces heavily constrained from free-play "to the point where the end state was scripted"
More of a political exercise than anything else. But this has been cited as an indication of the effectiveness of modern drone-based warfare.
Because the point of the wargame is that it's a training exercise for everyone involved, right down to the crews of the ships involved, not an nfl game. If the free-play portion ends up not exercising a bunch of expected scenarios because of an unexpected tactic, it would be monumentally wasteful to not make a note of the lesson and then reset with a script.
Right.
Did they make a note of the lesson? Did anything change?
I mean, I guess they noticed enough to classify the results for 25 years...
Well in the recent Iran war they kept their major ships far from Iran and didn't try to do any major operations in the area where small Iranian boats like those used in the wargame would be a threat. Indeed none of the vulnerabilities exposed by the Millennium Challenge were actual issues in the recent conflict. Whether that means the lesson was learned or the red team tactics were exploiting issues specific to the wargame is not clear.
They have sang lalalala with their fingers in their ears instead of noting the lesson, and it still would have been a monumental waste to not reset and continue the exercise.
It gets endlessly recycled whenever it's needed for political reasons.
This war game has been discussed many times.
One thing to consider is that Van Riper summoned assets unrealistically he used small boats to avoid detection but then attributed load outs that they couldn't realistically carry.
He also moved information unrealistically assuming that his units could communicate as efficently with paper moved by hand as they could with radios.
There are real, valid criticisms of the lessons we should have learned from the exercise, but it's not as simple as most analyses make it out to be.
IKR? "from a 2002 war game"
Have there really been no other more interesting war games in the last quarter-century, or did all the negative attention this got just result in us never hearing about another one?
There have been far more interesting war games in the last quarter century.[0]
This one shows the the US narrowly winning against China in a conflict over Taiwan. The US wins but with tremendous losses -- specifically in the form many munitions that take years to decades to replace.
And it just so happens that we witnessed a conflict play out just a few months ago and that resulted in a similar depletion of munitions albeit with minimal losses of American ships and aircraft.
What's very troubling about this is that in response the US moved munitions from the pacific into the middle east, leaving Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in a very vulnerable position.
This may explain why the current US president was unusually obsequious to the leader of China when in the past he had been particularly bellicose.
Also, cool fact: While researching this subject I learned that the engines for most American cruise missiles come from a single company.[1]
[0] https://chinaselectcommittee.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/se...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_International
"Red received an ultimatum from Blue, essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel.
Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected."
Interesting. This is exactly what Trump would do too. "The biggest most massive assault is coming tomorrow. Complete Destruction."
Even high tech drone and DF missiles also America will 100% lose. Why? No rare earth and magnets. Consistently dreaming of past glories like fighting Japanese in Midway and fighting Saddam. Remember USA lost to goat herders. I am 100% sure those Talebans have no J10C or Oreshnik missiles.
The US has started investing in low cost cruise missiles and drones https://www.twz.com/sea/10000-low-cost-cruise-missiles-in-th...
For ex $300k antiship missiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_Affordable_Capac...
We're still vulnerable to low tech warfare. We keep developing expensive systems that can't be manufactured quickly. One of the main reasons for success in WW2 was the fact that we could produce decent weapons in great volume. Japan had limited resources (draw a parallel to our rare earth situation). Germany had many advanced weapons, but couldn't produce enough (draw a parallel to our missiles).
We could because we had an industrial base that knew how to make stuff, not MBAs with delusions of grandeur who are belatedly discovering that they are easily dispensed with once the Chinese have acquired the manufacturing know-how.
We reacted to this late. But it isn’t a coïncidence that low-cost munitions are now receiving, in the U.S., other countries’ decadeslong weapons budgets.
Did you have to press a special key to get that diacritical, or are you a writer for the New Yorker?
Long press on a Mac.
"The simulated U.S. Navy battle group was defeated in ten minutes by an enemy that launched its attacks from commercial ships and using other unconventional means.
The findings of the newly released postmortem from the $250 million Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise foreshadowed “the very challenges the United States would face in... other conflicts since then,” according to Jones, who is FOIA director at the Post."
The details may have been classified, but I had read about the conclusion of the exercise back then, shortly before the Iraq War. Fortunately, Saddam's generals were not as competent and resourceful as General Van Riper USMC.
How is this dissimilar to the Ukrainian "Spider Web" attack on the Russian TU-22M and TU-95 aircraft?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
I keep wondering if this is a preview of the future. If I were a nation state looking to initiate hostilities, how "easy" it would be to have a handful of kamikaze drones discretely built and distributed around juicy targets.
Radar, AA, expensive jets, core infrastructure. All attacked as part of an opening salvo which could cripple the enemy's forces on the first day.
The US learnt this lesson over 80 years ago with the simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbour, Guam, Wake, Midway and the Philippines.
The difference is these days satellite surveillance makes it harder to secretly move military forces into place. Drone carrying cargo ships is the biggest risk.
Iran doesn't have real-time spy satellites and Starlink. it can only launch their shitty shaheds at stationary targets in impotent rage like Russia does.
It’s ok to be patriotic, but underestimating your enemy could be foolish or even fatal.
https://www.google.com/search?q=iran+launched+spy+satellite+...
Exactly! That's why the US won so decisively in Afghanistan! ;)
>the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom on 7 October 2001, alongside the United Kingdom. The two countries were later joined by a large multinational force, made up of multiple NATO members and two of their major non-NATO allies, as well as Afghanistan's local Northern Alliance. The invasion effort made rapid progress for the next two months as the coalition captured Kabul on 13 November and toppled the Taliban by 17 December, after which international military bases were set up near major cities across the country.
>13 killed (including 1 CIA officer and 4 non-combat deaths)[11]
if that was not a decisive victory, then I don't know what is.
the rest of the so-called war was a low intensity insurgency during 20 years of which the US lost fewer soldiers than Russia loses in 20 hours.
and a not inconsiderable amount of US PMC pork barrelling, related lobbying, contracts and business.
It's not nothing, and it seems that the scale of such things are enough to impact decisions and directions and lead to long low level churn with no particular outcome.
And now a dozen times in Iran?
Anyone can buy a StarLink terminal though. Also, you can use a friend's spy satellite if you don't have your own.
War game is not needed. The war with Iran has already proven that a relatively tiny but sophisticated opponent can have massive asymmetric impact on USA.
Relatively tiny? It is a 92 million person organisation with a 1.7 trillion dollar turnover, 2500+ years of continuous operations and covering an area 1/6th the size of USA.
"2500+ years of continuous operations"
I see it repeated a lot, but Iran is not a direct descendent of some Persian empire, it was conquered by Greeks, Arabs, Turks and Mongols and ruled by Arabs and Turks for most of its history.
These nationalist myths are not taken seriously for western countries but that criticism usually does not extend to foreign myths
More like 5000 years, Susa is nearly as ancient as Sumer.
Also the Iranians have cultural continuity going back that far, unlike the Egyptians, Iraqis or Indians. Only the Chinese rival them in that respect.
What is cultural continuity? Is France, a far more coherent nation is cultural continuous to the Gauls? Even though completely subjugated by the Romans?
Is the Islamic Republic more culturally similar to the Arab Khalifate it professes to emulate or Cyrus?
Also you brought up Sumer, how is Iran related to Sumer more than it is related to the actual Mesopotamian empires? I never heard someone claim that
I never said that. I said Susa/Sush, the beginning of Iranian civilization, is nearly as old as Sumer, by about 500 years. Historians generally consider Sumer the oldest true civilization, even if there are older settlements that didn't rise to the level of complexity rating as civilization.
Being occupied by foreign powers doesn't break cultural continuity, otherwise you'd claim the modern Greeks don't have continuity with ancient Athens, despite speaking the same language.
Continuity also doesn't mean being static. Modern Greek is not the same as classical Attic. Modern Greeks are Christian, not again, and so on.
Yes, the context however is not cultural continuity but national continuity. When someone claims Iran is bound to win because of 2500 years of empire, that seems like a joke considering the amount of foreign rule it endured.
Some hermetic cultural continuity except for language is also doubtful, Iran culture is grounded in Arabian culture no less than it is grounded in Persian culture. Hence the entire national unifying concept of Islamic Republic and heir to the Khalifates.
Regarding Susa, as far as I understand they haven't spoken an Indo-European language and Elamite is not related to Persian at all, so why do you think it shows cultural continuity?
Ok. tiny might have been a stretch but Iran spends $10B a year on military compared to $900B for the US. Iran has 500 aircraft (pre conflict) vs 13,000 for US.
Cool. Gives hope to Greenland, Canada, and other places threatened by the USA.
Everything in this country can afford to be a grift if everyone treats the treasury as an infinite source of capital.
This is a systematic issue which very few people care about.
I think they know that the military is mostly a grift in spending at times of peace. It keeps the military and benefactors happy. the defense industry employs people , which helps with support for the military.
In times of war, they expect mobilization will mean different things.
But I don't think it works that way. You can't suddenly go low tech, the mindset and the skills pipeline can't just be developed within a few months. It doesn't matter how much willpower or money you have.
The way tech and warfare is going, it's a volume game. Both sides have drones, both sides have anti-drone systems. Which side can get enough drones past defenses to cause harm? Which side can keep producing enough drone swarms and sustain enormous casualties and keep fighting?
The new supply line is the one you need to keep drones fueled up, and within line-of-sight and other comms requirement boundaries, since the other guys will be jamming, and the deeper you string from further away, the more difficult the other guys will find it to fight back, or defend.
I focused in on drones/UAV, but I think it applies to all forms of warfare today. Not just UAV, but even infantry.
The US has been at war regularly for a long time now. On one hand, it means a well trained and prepared fighting force. On the other hand, what it takes to win a war against the US has been figured out by all its serious adversaries. Undermine its soft power, alienate it from its network of allies, and attack the political will of the American public. That last bit is how Korea, Afghanistan, and now Iran were a loss for the US. It goes for any country, it's never about the superiority of technology, or arms alone.
The Manhattan project didn't win the war in the pacific theater of the second world war for example, at least not ultimately. ultimately, the fact that the japanese leadership accepted that there would be more nukes, and that american leadership, and public alike are more than willing to keep killing hundreds of thousands of civilians did. All serious enemies of the US now know that they must get the american public on their side, or get the american public to simply not care about fighting them at such high costs.
I can't imagine a good way to solve that ultimate weakness...other than to reduce costs. Instead a million dollar UAV, use a $99 kimikaze UAV, and send 10k of them at a time, constant waves of attacks that are impossible to defend. demoralize and destabilize the enemy very quickly at low cost before opinions waver.
I only said all that purely for intellectual curiosity though. War is a filthy thing. There is no realistic prospect of homeland warfare for the US. I would prefer to not be prepared for war at all. A constant state of readiness for war is inviting war. It needs to be written into law that peacetime defense spending cannot exceed more than a certain portion of the GDP to national debt ratio, and never above like 1% of revenue.
The American populace would probably support a war if the American homeland was attacked. But American leaders would much rather project force elsewhere, which makes it hard to get the average American to buy into their schemes.