Guided missile means, metal airframe, jet engine, depending on targets thermal imaging or radar terminal guidance, radar altimeters, terrain imaging radars, 100 - 500 kilogram payload.
Remote guidance is a very hard problem, modern computers have made it much easier to solve.
Even an 80s missile, required hundred of thousands of dollars of equipment just for guidance. Now all you need is a simple computer, a cheap camera and a cheap accelerometer.
Drones are much easier to down than missiles, but they make it up in volume.
Do you mean stuff like FP-5 Flamingo? These are really cruise missiles. Why would you call it a suicide drone? Because it has wings? Tomahawks have wings. Because the design is based on a target drone, so what the capabilities are very much inline with munitions we call cruise missiles.
The drone/guided missile divide is really about dividing a continuum which on one end has foam wings and raspberry pie equivalents wrapped in tin foil and on the other million dollar tomahawks. The distinction is the price tag and the capabilities really.
Flamingo is pretty close to a cruise missile in many ways. You correctly observe that this is a continuum but most but not all drones have props whereas all missiles are either rocket based or jet engine based and missiles tend to be a lot faster and do not allow for a change of plan after launch.
So no. But the Lyutyi (sp?), the FP-1 and the Nynja all qualify as drones (and there are many, many more, it's a veritable zoo) if you make that distinction, as do all of the sea-borne gear.
The ones that are decimating the russian oil industry are a bit more impressive than that. The foam wing ones are mostly Shaheds, the Ukrainian ones tend to be made of various plastics and/or fibreglass or composites for the more specialized stuff.
Imo foam wings and low cost components is very impressive. Low cost easy production is an actual tangible benefit. If it destroys the target and is easy cheap to make, it is a better arm.
Yeah not so much for it's radars, or for the f35 parked on the flight deck, which may be you know loaded with thousands of gallons of fuel and hundreds of pounds of missiles and bombs.
Sure, it won't sink it, but operations may be disrupted, for hours to days.
Rocket engines are typically used for short range missiles like AGM-65, or ballistic missiles. All cruise missiles use jet engines to achieve long ranges.
Cheap as hell, doesn’t need a launchpad and can be launched from a pick up truck, super easy to make and can be scattered all over the country so there’s no central location to bomb to stop them, fly literally meters of the ground so they’re very hard to detect and you can make tens of thousands of them very quickly and very easily.
And one of them can't scratch the paint on a modern naval vessel. Anti-ship warheads alone weigh more than an entire Shahed-136 drone.
As has been demonstrated countless times in SINKEX training, it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel. And even then they usually don't actually sink.
Nothing you can cheaply build in your garage will do meaningful damage to a large naval vessel. It will have neither the weight nor the penetration required.
You might need to consider lateral options. What if someone flew 1,000 drones at the windows on the bridge? How many BBs can hit that fancy radar before it is out of service?
Nothing/neither/cant when millions of dollars and hundreds of lives are on the line? 'Are you sure about that?' Defending against these types of threats is well worth considering.
It's the radars really for destroyers. The bridge is not actually where the ship is run during combat.
There is a room called the combat information center, that's where the ship is run from during combat, and that is behind armor, even in modern warships.
Additionally ships are separated into semi independent zones, that can take control of the ship, and continue fighting even if the rest of the ship is on fire.
The real liabilities are the radars, and the rest of the sensors in surface combat ships and the airplanes on deck in the case of aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers in general are heavily armored compared to other modern warships and it takes a significant amount of firepower to even disable them much less sink them.
That's great if you're in a shallow anchorage (average depth: 45 feet). Less so if you sink in the Arabian sea and you're under fire during the refloating process.
I also suspect modern ships are a little more sensitive to complete immersion.
> In May 2019, the Minister of Defense was presented with a report from Defense Material which concluded that a possible repair would cost 12–14 billion and take more than five years. The cost of purchasing a new corresponding vessel was estimated at NOK 11–13 billion, with a completion time of just over five years.
Your scenario imagines a naive and completely fictional concept of how modern naval systems actually work. That you can’t conceive of why what you are suggesting is effectively impossible means you truly don’t understand the domain.
The reason designed-for-purpose anti-ship missiles/drones are so expensive is they are literally designed to be somewhat effective at executing exactly the scenario you are laying out, while not being naive about the defenses that military ships actually have. Anybody that understands the capability space knows that your scenario wouldn’t survive contact with real defenses.
You are making an argument from fiction. Do you take the “hackers breaking cryptography” trope from Hollywood at face value?
Yup. There’s the concept of “mission kill”. It’s very difficult to sink a battleship with 5” guns. Use them to blast off all the range finders, radars, and secondary battery and that ship will be headed home after the battle.
The difference is strategic. A mission kill is a repairable loss. It is an order of magnitude easier to fix a battleship than to build a new one.
Of course, you can use boatloads of cheap drones to kill the radars and CIWS, destroy the planes on deck and other juicy targets.
Then launch a second wave of heavy anti-ship missiles (which you might have too few, due to their costs) to transform mission kills into really sunken ships.
If they're small - like quadcopter size - then how did you get them in range of a ship more then 10 miles off shore?
If they're large, like back of a pickup sized (which is roughly a Shahed[1] - link for scale) then how did you transport and move them without being noticed and interdicted?
For comparison one of Russia's largest drone attacks on Ukraine, and thus in the world, happened recently and included about 1000 Shaheds over a distributed area.
You're talking about flying a 1000 of something into exactly one target which has CIWS designed to track and kill supersonic missiles at close range (and is likely in a flotilla with data linked fire control).
You might get lucky I guess but I absolutely wouldn't bet on it.
They're also using their USVs as drone motherships.
> If they're large, like back of a pickup sized (which is roughly a Shahed - link for scale) then how did you transport and move them without being noticed and interdicted?
The Taliban moved pickup-sized loads around just fine.
> You're talking about flying a 1000 of something into exactly one target which has CIWS designed to track and kill supersonic missiles at close range (and is likely in a flotilla with data linked fire control).
Here's one failing to shoot a single Shahed in Baghdad down.
It takes a surprisingly small warhead to destroy a 100 million dollar radar array. A mission kill requires much less damage than actually sinking a ship. Take out an Arleigh Burkes radars and it's a 2 billion dollar container ship.
It's more like, through the combined use of drones, sea-drones, and anti-ship missiles, backed by the productive might and surveillance capability of NATO, against a weak Russian navy. Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy.
> Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy.
I mean yes thats true, but you also have to look at the capacity to renew what they are using to fight the war.
Iran appears to have a large supply of drones, enough to overwhelm US defences. Each drone is ~$50k and takes a few weeks to build, the anti-dorne missle (depending on what one it is) costs $4m and take longer.
If trump does decide to take Kharg island, then to stop the troops from being slamai sliced they'll need an efficient, cheap anti drone system, which I don't think the US has (apart from the Phalanx, but there arent enough of those)
To stop the drone threat, they'd have to clear roughly a 1500km circle. no small feat.
the bigger issue is that the goal if this war is poorly defined. It was supposedly to do a hit and run, and gain a captive client. Had they listened to any of the intelligence, rather than the ego, they would have known this would have happened. that has failed, now what, what do they need to achieve? There is no point committing troops if they are there for show. (there was no real point in this war either, well for the US at least.)
You can if you live in the US! It isn’t particularly expensive either, high explosives are industrial chemistry. A few dollars per kilo. Maybe a little bit more if you want something fancy.
Thanks to movies, people both seriously overestimate and underestimate the capabilities of highly engineered explosive devices, albeit in different dimensions. Generally speaking, sophisticated military targets are not susceptible to generic explosives. A drone with a hundred kilos of explosive will essentially bounce off a lot of targets. An enormous amount of engineering goes into designing an explosive device optimized to defeat that specific target. They use supercomputers to get this stuff right. Exotic engineered explosive devices are unreasonably capable.
TBH, once you realize the insane amount of engineering that goes into it, it kind of takes the fun out of it. A lot of high-leverage research goes into aspects an amateur would never think about.
This is in some ways a blessing. Amateurs with bad intentions almost always fail at the execution because it isn’t something you can learn by reading the Internet.
Amateurs who try to build their own explosives usually either fail to explode or explode killing the builder.
An older friend of mine at Boeing told me how when he was a teen, he had a teen friend who built a pipe bomb. They drove off to a field to set it off. It didn't explode, so his friend went to investigate. Then it went off, and my friend had the pleasure of driving his gutted friend to the hospital to die.
There's a selection process at work where smart people who know what they're doing don't try to assemble bombs in their garage for fun. If there's a legitimate reason like your country is fighting an existential war the kinds of people who can do things start doing things.
But it's just rare having a person smart enough to be able to do it be stupid enough to try. (and the people who do are nutjob terrorists like Timothy McVeigh)
FWIW, McVeigh got a lot of the technical details right, including many non-obvious ones. That was a sophisticated attempt by someone that actually knew what they were doing. It goes a long way toward explaining why that particular bombing was so effective.
That said, plenty of extremely smart people assemble bombs in their garage for fun. It is almost a rite of passage, at least in the US. The fact that historically you could just buy the common stuff incentivized smart people to attempt more technically difficult things for bragging rights. Most people have no concept for how available legal high explosives are in the US, even after 9/11 made it a bit more difficult.
Cost, I'd guess? There must be a reason why Russia and Ukraine are using more drones than missiles in their strikes. And while capabilities are somewhat different, if a ship carrying oil or LNG get hit by either one, it's going to have some consequences
