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 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.