> My genuine hope is that secretly we actually are really good with drones and just strategically have decided not to broadcast it...

What would you call the Reapers and such? The US has a massive fleet of large, armed drones, remotely operated, and quite a few are capable of being armed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicles_in_th...

It's different from the consumer/small commercial drones being talked about here, but the US Military is pretty darn good at UAVs.

True. This is a very different class of drone. What is the defense against an adversary who releases a thousand quadcopter style drones against a US aircraft carrier?

The carriers aren't sailing around alone - they're escorted by a whole fleet (plus air patrol) that will intercept the drone launching vehicle at multiple dozen nautical miles range. Smaller quadcopter drones won't even get close to catching the carrier (which can travel over 40 kts while evading) before their batteries die. And even if a few hundred got through, how much damage can they really do? I'd imagine the flight decks can be patched quickly, although some radar equipment & any jets parked at the time of the attack would probably be lost.

It's definitely a concern as part of a larger attack, but I don't think a quadcopter drone swarm alone is likely to sink a carrier or leave it combat ineffective in the long term.

Agreed. But there's going to be "happy medium" drones that can be delivered by a long-range mothership. Price is no object when you can take out a carrier.

That's just silly. For attacks against surface targets, the bombers or strike aircraft (possibly unmanned) are going to continue carrying large, fast cruise missiles just like they have been since the 1960's. There is zero reason to use quadcopter type drones for this mission.

Maybe figure out what types of swarms China _can_ defend against, and then send a different type of swarm.

The type of quadcopter style drones that can be produced in the thousands have very short range and limited sensors. How are they going to get to the aircraft carrier? The lessons learned in a land conflict in Eastern Europe have little relevance to the Pacific Theater, where the US Navy intends to focus now.

Insanely sophisticated electronic warfare that can disrupt / defeat / destroy.

A few nice miniguns with radars sensitive enough to pick up birds that fire flak.

Auto cannons.

Missiles.

... Lasers.

> My genuine hope is that secretly we actually are really good with drones and just strategically have decided not to broadcast it

I am confused.

The US has massive fleets of military drones of every type and size that have been proven in combat environments. They literally pioneered the development of this type of military system and have been using them operationally decades before anyone else. Did everyone just forget this?

The US has extremely mature and capable drone technology, much better than a lot of what is being used in Ukraine. Really the only question is the ability of the US to scale production if it needed to.

Entire categories of drones are missing from the US arsenal, such as the ultra-cheap wire-guided ones that allow Ukrainians to fly 20 km into the enemy's rear, enter buildings, explore them from the inside, and leave behind presents or detonate immediately if they find any targets. Such drones can be seen at the start of this video, and at the very end too, when they are sneaking up to artillery and puncturing gun barrels: https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1893632328108220538

The US leads in larger drones, like the Global Hawk, which is the size of a regional airliner, can stay airborne for more than a day, and cover tens of thousands of kilometers in that time. The smaller and cheaper ones are just expensive toys, far behind what's seen in Ukraine in terms of actual usefulness. A cheap Chinese agricultural sprayer drone with equally cheap 3D-printed drum of infantry grenades or an anti-tank mine strapped to it outperforms most "military grade" commercial offerings like Switchblade that cost ten times as much and are good for only a single use, unlike the sprayer, which returns home after dropping its payload.

The US has a different drone tech tree than Ukraine. Ukraine is adapting to the limitations of the cheap drones available to them. There is value in this as operational knowledge but it is a mistake to assume that the US is bound by similar constraints. They do things differently because they have other options. The US has plenty of experience designing wire-guided systems; they largely abandoned them for a reason.

There is much to learn about drone warfare from Ukraine but I would not expect a conflict with advanced technical capabilities to look similar.

The US doesn’t try to build cheap One-Way Attack drones like Ukraine because the US has the most advanced air force in the world and utilizes that for surveillance and combat. They have advanced communications and battlefield coordination tools so that a small unit commander doesn’t need to carry/use drones. They can get surveillance from those Global Hawks and call in strikes from Reapers. The drones allow Ukraine to conduct asymmetric warfare against a larger force with more resources. The US is the larger force, and so those types of drones are a niche product, not a primary weapon.