Chair of joint chiefs of staff and others in classified meeting said Iran is trying to get US to spend its munitions
Top military officials told lawmakers in a closed door briefing on Tuesday that they may not be able to shoot down every Iranian drone being launched against US military installations and assets in retaliatory attacks, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The officials, led by the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Dan Caine, said Iran has been deploying thousands of one-way attack drones and while they have capacity to take down the vast majority but not all of the barrage.
As a result, the officials said in a classified briefing for lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the US was focused on destroying the launch sites for the drones and conventional missiles as quickly as possible. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.
It’s crazy to me that the US doesn’t have “fuck you” hoards of weapons and tech, ready to go at any time.
Hollywood did a number on me.
We gave up healthcare and education for this, but at least we still have the right to a weekly mass shooting :/
It’s asymmetric. The weapons you need to take out a swarm of drones are orders of magnitude more expensive (and complicated) than the drones.
So, any horde of such weapons cannot be replenished as quickly as the drones can.
The US hasn’t really invested in anti-drone weapons, despite the obvious risk they pose as demonstrated in Ukraine.
So instead they’re trying to blow up a $200 drone with a multi-million dollar missile, and they don’t even have a 100% hit rate. Things like RF jammers, real big nets, and big foam darts would be just as effective if not more so as they could take up multiple target simultaneously, and considerably cheaper and reusable. But nope.
I mean, we do, but we did give some of it to Ukraine (not a criticism) and also more importantly, we want to keep having that hoard. I guess who knows wtf our foreign policy is now, but in general if you have a big, one-time-use stick, it’s smarter to threaten to use the stick than it is to actually use it and just hope that there’s nothing else that needs whacking afterwards. See also: whenever Russia threatens to nuke things
The problem is if you’re being attacked by a swarm of angry bees your giant stick used for attacking humans isn’t much use. The US likes to criticise other countries for under spending on their military but they themselves haven’t used their military funding to maximum efficiency either.
Trump is talking about building a new kind of battleship despite them being completely useless in any contemporary war.
A battleship would likely be a missile battleship, not a traditional naval one
Oh yeah I’ve seen the AI generated imagery. It’s going to have missiles and lasers and lots and lots of guns. And it’s going to sit out there in the ocean being completely useless, and then at night $2,000 worth of drones are going to come in under stealth of dark and they’re going to land, then they’re going to explode and sink it.
The cost disparity is enormous.
The US navy knows this which is why they haven’t been building lots of ships lately. But Trump doesn’t care about any of that he wants to ship with his name on it.
Ja but it still doesn’t make sense. He’s just doing it because the name is cool and it’d be big, and he thinks bigger = better.