But what would you rather have? 2000 Shahed/Lucas drones or a single F35? Same cost for both. The saying "Quantity has a quality all of its own" is not obsolete in 2026.
2000 shaheds are just a regular week in Ukraine. 90% of that are destroyed far away from targets and the other 10% do cause some damage, but it is usually far from being devastating as the drone is far from being very precise. A single F35 which could penetrate air defense and go into the country would be a real problem. If Russia has 10 of them, I think it would significantly alter the current equation of power as i…
I think that "air superiority" thinking is part of what's changed.
USA/Israel forces have air superiority over Iran. That doesn't stop Iran being able to fly drones or missiles.
I don't know if you've looked recently, but the pacific is, likev pretty big. Maybe even bigger than that. The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1] Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb. It's also considerably harder to…
Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit. The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable.…
> Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely.
Yeah, except missiles are better at it and the navy has spent the last 30+ years innovating ways to defeat missile attacks. What exactly do you think is the difference between a "drone" and a missile here?
> Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit.
Satellites orbit. They move. They have a limited area they can see at any given time and that area is constantly shifting.
Something with the budget of the US Navy can do the math to figure out where the satellite can look and then move. If your sat is orbiting the earth every 4 hours, a carrier group could be 100+ miles away by the time it comes back around.
And, even if you manage to get a satellite picture that shows that at 8:32pm the carrier group was at lat 32/long 42; you can't exactly just open up your missiles and program that in and sink a carrier.
So none of them lost on ground in Iran. No US ship was to my knowledge even hit by a drone/missle. Iran has been prepping forever for this with Russian/Chinese equipment. This sounds identical to previous arguments I saw of how hard it would be for US to beat Iran in open conflict. China is different but comparing theoretical ability with reality is different also. The only reality we have as of now is that f35 compl…
> If a nation wants to toss cheap drones at you there's basically nothing that can be done.
Ukraine is doing something. It has to, because this is what it faces from Russia.
I don't believe parent is right, but satelites don't stay in one place unless they're on the equator, because otherwise they have to be moving. This means that you need many satelites to maintain coverage of a single spot. I don't know how many military satelites China has, but I would have assumed it would be sufficient to cover the pacific sufficiently to find an aircraft carrier. (the obvious caveat here being clo…
The JWST has a 6.5 meter mirror. The largest (known) spy satellites have a mirror of ~3m diameter. At GEO (geostationary orbit) that would provide an imaging resolution of about 7 meters. An aircraft carrier is about 337x76 meters. So from geostationary altitudes, a satellite similar to a KH-11 would see an American aircraft carrier as a blob of about 48 "pixels". This is probably enough signal to track all aircraft…
> It would have a field of view roughly the size of Houston (50x50 miles)
Wait, what?
Like, this is a whole bunch of extremely unreliable numbers being stacked on top of each other to reach an unsupported conclusion, but how is a 50 square mile field of view supposed to find something in the middle of the pacific?
The US blockade of the strait does not affect Iran's ability to blockade the strait. And the latter hurts the US (and the rest of the world) way more that the blockade by the US hurts Iran. No amount of F35s will change that. Iran has no reason to try to attack US military vessels or aircraft. Surprisingly (actually unsurprisingly) relevant: https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/ Especially the pa…
You are missing the point above - the F35 has enabled complete air dominance over Iran, and ability to perform any operation with impunity over Iran's land. Iran is leveraging its geography and asymmetrical warfare against civilian ship (as done by its proxies), but if the US has build tons of cheap attack drones, that wouldn't have changed anything about this equation. The US already has the ability to strike anywhe…
Your definition of "complete dominance" is different from most people's.
If you completely dominate your enemy, you prevent them from being able to affect the situation. Iran is maintaining a blockade over a major shipping lane that the USA does not want them to. The USA's inability to prevent this shows that they are not "completely dominating" Iran.
In a serious war drone factories are getting bombed (by F-35s) and there is no need to handle a never-ending stream of drones. The war in Ukraine is special because neither side is capable of air supremacy. Note that the original article doesn't say anywhere that F-35-like capability is not needed.
So Ukraine isn't a serious war then? And I take it you believe we failed to employ that strategy in Iran ... why, exactly? The alternative interpretation being that isn't how things work. Swarms of cheap drones are the new reality thus appropriate countermeasures are required on the front lines.
The key difference is that "swarms of inexpensive drones" can be made in "swarms of normal looking residential garages". The entire enterprise can be decentralized making it much tougher to target with strategic weapons.
In the navy they call long-range underwater drones a "torpedo". It has been assumed to be a primary threat against ships for a century. Modern navies have many systems purpose-built to deal with that threat.
Plus these things have a range of about 50 miles. It's not like if you are a carrier floating in the pacific, you will be swarmed with a thousand torpedoes. To launch one requires a submarine, and while one may hide, it's not so easy to penetrate the defenses of a carrier group in the middle of the pacific. Ukraine has had success against mostly unarmored and a few lightly armored Russian ships (and let's face it, th…
> To launch one requires a submarine
Torpedoes cannot be launched from manned / unmanned surface vessels?
Wow.
Good job China isn't getting into water surface drone swarms.
Still, easy to see why close waters near Iran keep the US carrier groups away.
Maybe re-read the last sentence of parent which my reply was to? Your presumably Ai-generated reply missed that, unsurprisingly, because you probably just copypasta'd parent and my reply in there? P.S. air dominance in Iran is meaningless in this conflict. Read e.g. the blog post I linked to for context.
> P.S. air dominance in Iran is meaningless in this conflict. Read e.g. the blog post I linked to for context. It's meaningless now . If the US, for some reason, decided to say, "For each drone or missile that you fire at one of your Arab neighbors or Israel, we launch an old-fashioned B52 raid on your industry or infrastructure. Come to the negotiating table." and actually carried out that threat, well, there would…
Bombing civilian infrastructure never works like this. As we saw in The Blitz (and in Vietnam, and in Ukraine), it just draws the bombed together, unifying them and hardening their resolve.
> Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this. The problem is that the F-35 was intended to be the low co…
The F-35 is a massive success. It is a common design that brought together what would have been three to five different planes into one. Costs doubling is further proof of how amazing it is- inflation has basically outpaced that. Cost per flight hour has more to do with data analytics and the Socialism within the DoW (it's a jobs program) than actual need. A lot of delays were quasi-on purpose. It has crazy supply ch…
I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well, our Military has been amazing and, if you read the Fake News, like The Failing New York Times, the absolutely horrendous and disgusting Wall Street Journal, or the now almost defunct, fortunately, Washington Post, you would actually think we are losing the War. The enemy is confused, because they get these same Media “reports,” and yet they realize their Navy has been completely wiped out, their Air Force has gone onto darker runways, they have no Anti Missile or Anti Airplane Equipment, their former leaders are mostly gone (This has been, in addition to everything else, Regime Change!), and perhaps, most important of all, THE BLOCKADE, which we will not take off until there is a “DEAL,” is absolutely destroying Iran. They are losing $500 Million Dollars a day, an unsustainable number, even in the short run. The Anti-America Fake News Media is rooting for Iran to win, but it’s not going to happen, because I’m in charge! Just like these unpatriotic people used every ounce of their limited strength to fight me in the Election, they continue to do so with Iran. The result will be the same — It already is! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Satellites aren't pointed at "all parts of the planet". They're generally taking regular photos of known locations, when the right type of satellite passes over. That's where you get lucky shots like the one you noticed. Then that satellite has to orbit, and there isn't another one nearby just ready to take another photo. Then the carrier changes direction...
Sure any single one but there are many companies, some with hundreds of satellites in orbit at any given time who will point it where ever if you pay them enough Which is why you get things like this https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/05/satellite-firm-planet-labs-t... An aircraft carrier is not that fast, if you see it once you know roughly what radius of circle it is going to be in for a while (ignoring the fact that the…
This is literally the point: it's easy to tell them to point a satellite at beirut and get pictures every 3 hours or whatever, it's much more difficult to tell them to point at a location in the middle of the pacific ocean... because you don't know the location in the first place.
Beirut doesn't move around a lot. Carriers do. While there are a lot of satellites pointing at the earth at any one moment, this isn't some kind of Hollywood super screen showing a real time image of the entire pacific. You just see whatever small patch the satellite happens to be pointing at.
And again, ignoring the part where america would probably start shooting down satellites.