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Such drones do not exist, and frankly never really existed.
First off, small drones like DJ quadcopters are a non-factor here (outside of sneak attacks) because they can't travel far enough. So we're looking at cruise missiles (which is what a Shahed really is). The smaller variants (like the 131) aren't serviceable for our purpose because they can't reach, so we're looking at a 136 with long range. Now we can either rely on remote control via satcom (which is going to be vulnerable to jamming) or we can turn them loose with a missile seekerhead.
I don't consider myself exactly an expert in how easy it would be to jam them, but I think possibly it's "really freakin' easy" because GPS jamming doesn't seem to be very hard and even just GPS jamming will likely make cuing a Shahed onto a target difficult because the operator will get lost. Of course, if we're okay accepting the payload penalty and cost increase, we can try to harden, possibly unsuccessfully, against this.
Or you can put an antiship missile seekerhead on it. But you're going to need a sophisticated seekerhead because if you just have a cheap one that says "kill big thing" you're just going to kill 10,000 radar reflectors or get decoyed by ECM. So now you've put the seekhead from a high-performance missile into a platform that has great range but very poor terminal characteristics (by which I mean they are slow and probably not particularly difficult to shoot down).
And you have another problem, which is that your warhead is not that big - 100 pounds, I think Russia put a 200 pound warhead on theirs, presumably at the expense of range. This is not very big for hitting a ship. The Exocet has a warhead of 350 pounds (and is supersonic), the Harpoon is subsonic and has a nearly 500 pound warhead. The Naval Strike Missile has a 260 pound warhead, which is closer in size, but it relies on being able to pick the point of impact on a target. So in order to replicate this with a Shahed, we're adding an artificial intelligence capability (or hoping that our operator is pretty nimble and good at figuring out the weak point on a massive container ship).
Either way, you've basically made an antiship missile, because you've spent the time and money hardening it against defenses and making it smart. But it doesn't have the terminal performance that helps antiship missiles survive CIWS, so you've made a crappy one. You've just spent, oh, let's say 25% of the cost of a real antiship missile and now you've gotten immediately shot down by a crappy gun someone strapped to the deck of a cargo vessel because Shaheds are actually really easy to shoot down (if you get on Twitter you can watch the Ukrainians shoot them down with like everything except one of those joke guns that, when fired, pops a little flag out and says BANG! This is why I say that "drones cheaper than missiles used to shoot them down" have never really existed, any of the cheap drones can be shot down cheaply by air defenses from the Second World War and much more easily with modern kit.)
The main problem with shooting down Shaheds with guns is that the universe of spaces that can be hit with Shaheds is usually bigger than the universe of spaces that can be defended with guns, and the engagement geometry of hitting low-flying Shaheds with point defense can be tricky. In some ways it is much easier to defend ships because
On top of that, the US military very quickly adapted cheap ($20,000 - $30,000, likely competitive with the Shahed, possibly much cheaper now that we've adapted the Shahed into an anti-shipping role) laser-guided rocket that is very good at shooting down Shaheds. I'm sure the Japanese can strap these onto F-2s (and probably lots of other aircraft, including trainers) to quickly cover large amounts of airspace and intercept the Shaheds before they arrive. And they have a larger and, I think, better AWACS force than Russia (about two dozen AWACS aircraft, including modern E-2s with an AESA array). It is hard to detect low-flying drones against ground clutter, but the E-2 is basically going to be one of the best platforms for finding the little buggers.
Finally, to circle back to the thing I mentioned with regard to terminal performance, the slow speed of the Shahed is a huge problem for interdicting ships. A ballistic missile will cross from China to the Pacific in what, 15 minutes? A ship going 20 knots will go 5nm in that time. A Shahed travels at about 115 miles per hour. You're looking at like an eight hour flight time, during which the ship will have traveled more than a hundred miles. Even if you're trying to hit a stationary vessel at dock, a RO-RO or self-discharger can disgorge a lot of material, and then depart or relocate in half that time.
None of this is to deny your point about insurance, although it is likely that insurance would go completely insane just by declaring the area a no-go zone; the Japanese government would likely have to requisition/purchase shipping or subsidize insurance. Similarly, it's undoubtedly true that China is a major industrial power. I am far from convinced that this would be a good way to wage an anti-shipping campaign, but China has a ton of industry, so even if it is the worst possible way to wage an anti-shipping campaign, they might be able to make it work!
It's also not to deny that the Shahed is a good weapon. It is! Particularly against fixed ground targets, and particularly when you can launch large numbers of them and overwhelm air defenses, and most particularly if you can use them as part of a strategy rather than a substitute for one. But if you try to turn it into a reliable antiship missile against distant, well-defended targets you're either introducing cost creep per weapon or you are accepting much less lethality and reliability, which means more missiles per target, which means higher cost again. (If you're inclined to doubt me on this consider that, from what I can tell, the Houthis did not manage to do any serious damage with drones; the ships they sank were hit with a ballistic missiles or USVs.)
My basic point here is that there's a reason that Shaheds have supplemented more conventional weapons systems like ballistic and antiship missiles, rather than replacing them. And similarly that war is hard.
I just mean a world where everything is nice and mathematical, instead of having to deal with messy geopolitics.
If the US fleet and the Chinese fleet fought on an infinite featureless plain the US fleet would win. Everybody knows this. The question everyone is asking is if the United States can prevent China from seizing an island about a hundred miles away from their own territory when the US can bring maybe a third of its fleet to bear and the Chinese have every single advantage of geography. It's possible that the answer is "no" but the fact that that is the question should tell you a lot about the relative power of the two countries. I think it's a war the US could lose but I think the people who tell you it's a war the Chinese would easily win are, well, overly-optimistic.
Au contraire - the shahed drone is itself one of these drones. This isn't because the drones are particularly cheap (although the shahed is both cheap and easy to manufacture), but because the US MIC is fantastically corrupt and so their interceptor missiles are extremely expensive, far more so than the drones themselves. These interceptors are also reliant on materials parts that are sourced from China, who presumably won't be selling them to their military adversaries (yes, the US can source and process themselves - you'll just have to spend a decade or so getting the infrastructure required up and running. Good luck!)
This is in fact the main point I am making. Is it possible to defend against this kind of attack? Absolutely. But is it possible to do so in a way that's sustainable and doesn't prevent the Chinese from achieving their goal of preventing commercial traffic? No. That's all they need to do - render commercial shipping unviable. There are all sorts of unique options available to them - I've heard that they're working on some really cool underwater drones as well, which would be even more fun to shoot down and interdict. But the point remains that the Chinese would be able to prevent Japan from resupplying in any real way while the Japanese would be unable to return the favour. Even if I just abandon the argument about military effectiveness to you entirely, the relative economic impacts on both parties from this kind of strategy is too much to overcome.
I agree - it's just that the Chinese have both, and more importantly the economic and industrial base required to sustain modern warfare for far longer than Japan.
Actually nobody would win - all the ships would just fall over and be unable to move. But the problem is that the industrial base which made the US navy has since been shipped off to China, who, according to the Pentagon, are capable of manufacturing 236 ships to every 1 produced by the US. In any kind of long or sustained conflict, China wins hands down.
The problem is that the reason Taiwan is valuable is the TSMC manufacturing plants, which can be easily destroyed the moment Taiwan looks to be in danger. If China wanted, they could in fact take over Taiwan - especially with the US tied down in Iran. The problem is that taking over Taiwan with military force renders it almost completely worthless, which is why the optimal strategy for the Chinese is to just wait for the US' decline to progress further and then take it bloodlessly.
I explained very specifically why I think this is incorrect, or at least misleading.
Since I wrote a rather large comment, I will recap:
If you're going to discuss this stuff with me on here, please do me the courtesy of reading what I write (more or less). And if you're going to disagree with me, please do me the courtesy of explaining why, so that I can learn something new.
I did read your post, and I explicitly said I was contradicting your view. I am not unaware of the contents of your post, I just disagree with it. To wit:
The kind of guns which are capable of shooting down Shaheds are not going to be standard issue for commercial shipping vessels. How, exactly, are you going to outfit the commercial shipping fleet with all the guns and rockets required to shoot down these drones while simultaneously engaging in an active fight with the Chinese navy on the other side of the country? And if it is the US intervening, remember that the US navy is going to be tied down in Iran and the Middle East as well. All that these drones need to do to finish their mission in this specific case is make commercial traffic unviable, which your proposed solution doesn't actually prevent.
Moreover, we actually have an example of a weapons system used to shoot down shahed drones in the field - the C-RAM system used to protect the US Embassy in Baghdad. The US Embassy in Baghdad has been abandoned, and the C-RAM system failed to provide adequate protection - I'm not sure due to the difficulty of getting footage, but I believe it was actually destroyed by a drone. You'll have to forgive me for not believing this was a viable answer to shahed drones when I have seen footage of it failing to defend against shahed drones in a conflict happening right now.
Ok, so how many vessels are transiting the strait right now? If the US has an economic and worthwhile answer to these drones, why haven't they used them to open the Strait of Hormuz? We have a perfect, real-life test case for this technology and what we actually see is the US navy giving up, unable to prevent the Iranians from interdicting or destroying commercial traffic. Furthermore, what are the actual economics of these cheap, laser-guided rockets? Do they rely on components or parts that have to be shipped from China? Is there a manufacturing base capable of supplying enough of them to outpace Iran, China and Russia's production of Shahed/Shahed derivatives?
It's not particularly difficult to simply strap a short-range weapons system onto a ship.
This remains to be seen!
You'll have to forgive me for believing that it is a viable answer to Shahed drones when I have seen footage of Shahed drones being shot down by guns in a conflict happening right now.
No defense is 100% effective, and I am not claiming that. I am claiming the general idea that there is no way to counter Shaheds is overblown. The Ukrainians do it on the cheap all the time.
The US transited two destroyers through the strait, so...if the drones were so scary, why did that happen? As I pointed out to you before, the Houthis did not sink any ships with Shahed-type weapons. Based on the Houthis' experience, it seems pretty clear that torpedoes ("suicide drones"), ballistic missiles, and conventional missiles are a greater threat to shipping.
The current production capacity is believed to be around 25,000 annually. This isn't more than, say, Russia's supposed production, but they are unlikely to be shooting any at the US of A for some time, while to my knowledge China hasn't produced any Shaheds. I don't claim to know what Iran's production rate is due to Recent Events.
It's also worth noting that this is just one type of interceptor – the US has a number of anti-drone programs going on right now.
This story is from 2019 - if it was so easy to defeat the Shaheds, why isn't the Strait full of US navy ships easily taking those drones out of the sky and securing freedom of navigation?
True - I actually agree with you here, though doubtless for different reasons.
And what happened to the US embassy after that? I'm not claiming that systems like the C-RAM can't destroy those drones, but that they aren't an economically sustainable way to do so. Yes, you can shoot down a bunch of shaheds - but if there are enough of them they will get through, and the cost of making enough of them is lower than the cost of the defensive weapon system. At the same time, they can provide extra targets for the kind of expensive defensive system required to deal with nastier missiles.
If the US has robust and cost-effective anti-Shahed defence systems, why are their troops working from home in hotels? Why have they abandoned so many of their military bases in the region? Why isn't the US navy proudly sailing through the strait, drones defeated? Why is petroleum infrastructure in the gulf region blowing up so frequently? If what you're claiming is true the world would look very different today.
The main issue is not that Shaheds cannot be stopped - the issue is that they cannot be stopped in an economically viable fashion. The cost of anti-Shahed deterrence weapons is significantly higher than the cost of simply making more shaheds. As for Ukraine, I'm uncertain - I don't trust much of the information coming out of that warzone, and Russia has been making a lot of alterations and changes to their Gerans (did you see that new Jet Geran they announced recently?). If there's compelling and verifiable evidence that the Ukrainians are managing to deal with Russian drone warfare, I'll believe it - but that evidence is probably going to have to come in the form of them retaking all the territory they've lost so far.
Did they? I've heard conflicting reports about that incident, and the last I heard they ran away.
I agree with this. I'm sorry if I gave the impression I was advocating for some kind of Shahed-exclusive force - I've always been thinking about them in the context of a broader military package which includes the things you've just mentioned.
They're selling them on Alibaba - if you've got a spare 50k lying around you could buy one right now. They're advertised as ideal for spraying pesticides or taking photos for land surveying (not sure if they actively advertise them as suicide attack drones).
Iran has other threats, including mines and antiship missiles, that can threaten US ships in the strait. It's also true that a sufficient mass of anything could cause a ship to run out of ammunition! It doesn't surprise me that the Navy is keeping its ships further back where they have more flexibility.
I can also turn this question on its head: if Shaheds are so good, why haven't the Iranians sunk any destroyers yet? The long-range ones are supposed to go over 1,000 miles, and the Iranians are believed to have satellite imagery from Russia to help with targeting. We have reason to believe that the carrier strike groups were close enough to launch missiles at them because Trump specifically said that the carrier battle group was targeted with and shot down 101 missiles ("missiles" which suggests not Shahed, but Shaheds are really just cruise missiles and apparently Iran said their drone units were involved, so it could have been Shaheds). Either way, why didn't the Iranians use Shaheds to sink a carrier or a destroyer?
Correct.
You are shifting your goalposts here. What I was contesting specifically was the idea of
It's true that a Shahed costs less than a CIWS, the same as an anti-tank missile costs less than a tank, or an anti-ship missile costs less than a ship. But it looks like a CIWS burst is going to be cheaper than a Shahed.
It's quite likely that the US does not have enough robust and cost-effective anti-Shahed systems! Simply because there are cheaper ways to shoot down drones does not mean they have been procured at the necessary scale. A plausible end result of US counter-drone technology is giving aim-assist technology to riflemen or machine-gunners, which obviously has not happened yet.
It certainly appears that the US Navy did do this, including the "drones defeated" part.
Yes – in which case I think they can be a powerful tool. But I think as a cheap weapon they are at their best against fixed targets. If you have assured satellite coverage, then using them as an anti-ship weapon makes more sense, because you can put a man-in-the-loop. (But ironically this arguably makes them better suited in the role for the US than for Iran.)
This was an interesting claim. On a quick look, it looks like most of these drones are copters, and Alibaba apparently doesn't consider the range worth specifying (at least for the ones I viewed), which makes evaluating their utility as a weapon troublesome. I'd be very interested if you could provide the specific product you had in mind?
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