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.

• TulliusCicero

  today at 4:57 AM

  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?

• jandrewrogers

  today at 4:53 AM

  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.

• pfisch

  today at 4:41 AM

  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.

  • adamors

    today at 5:14 AM

    Projection works up until someone calls the bluff, just like Iran did.

• kakaz

  today at 5:09 AM

  [dead]

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.

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.

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.

• marshray

  today at 4:37 AM

  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?

  • Teever

    today at 4:50 AM

    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 particularly 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."

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...

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

• 3eb7988a1663

  today at 5:11 AM

  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.

• b65e8bee43c2ed0

  today at 4:49 AM

  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.

  • mandeepj

    today at 5:00 AM

    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+...

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.

• marshray

  today at 4:33 AM

  Did you have to press a special key to get that diacritical, or are you a writer for the New Yorker?

"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."

Cool. Gives hope to Greenland, Canada, and other places threatened by the USA.