Navy should transition from few expensive carriers to distributed drone-launching platforms—hundreds of cheap drone carriers, underwater drone deployments, and autonomous loyal wingmen for the naval air-force.
Drone carriers seem extremely important. Probably half the missiles and all the attack helicopters on every ship should be replaced with drones that cost 1/20th as much. Eg for amphibious assault ships, the America class, which carries 20 helicopters and some F35s, seems completely obsolete given it has no drone infrastructure. The Chinese Type 076 at least has a small catapult for drone launch, but both should really carry at least 50 large jet powered drones, 500 loitering munitions, 500 recon drones, 20,000 FPVs as well as surface and undersea drones.
Just how expensive are missiles and how bad is NATO at producing them? This article claims that the US navy has 10,000 VLS cells but only about 17,000 missiles (mostly the small SM-2 type), meaning the entire fleet couldn’t be reloaded even once after depleting their magazines.
Drone carriers seem extremely important. Probably half the missiles and all the attack helicopters on every ship should be replaced with drones that cost 1/20th as much. Eg for amphibious assault ships, the America class, which carries 20 helicopters and some F35s, seems completely obsolete given it has no drone infrastructure. The Chinese Type 076 at least has a small catapult for drone launch, but both should really carry at least 50 large jet powered drones, 500 loitering munitions, 500 recon drones, 20,000 FPVs as well as surface and undersea drones.
Just how expensive are missiles and how bad is NATO at producing them? This article claims that the US navy has 10,000 VLS cells but only about 17,000 missiles (mostly the small SM-2 type), meaning the entire fleet couldn’t be reloaded even once after depleting their magazines.