The Navy should consider mass drone defenses, thousands of counter drones. Simple enough to install basic tracking hardware for air to air combat.
I meant drone to small boats as well.
Bacon hoses.
Why not buff up the Phalanx and add a few more?
Seems like a simple civilian laser pointer can wreak havoc with pilots. Why not a military grade laser to dazzle the operators of the small boats? It would at least slow them down until they could be dealt with using hot lead if the laser was too weak to cause actual physical damage.
It’s a very difficult problem. the US Navy had to deal with action like this big time off Okinawa. Swarms of Kamikaze attacks.
The problem today with the types of weaponry available, a speedboat can be just one of dozens, each having to be tracked and targeted, each carrying something that could put a serious dent in the LCS.
That’s a job for an A/ESA, not a mechanical positioner/tracker. They may end up having to outfit these ships with weapons more suited to swarm attacks.
More importantly,how would our carriers and cruisers do?
How about a bunch of well trained sailors on deck with .50 caliber semi-auto Barretts?
In the hypothetical realm it would be fascinating to see a swarm boat attack on one of our World War 2 cruisers. Or even better, one of the battleships.
An Iowa class with twenty 5 inchers / eighty 40 MMs/ / and forty to fifty 20 MMs might have a little bit of a chance and be able to pick off one or two boats.
Since they first came out with the specifications, I’ve said the LCS were undergunned. They are over sized PT boats without any torpedoes. Or a Corvette without depth charges.
What they needed was a 3 inch class main gun, a couple of Gatlings in the 20 to 30 mm range, and quad 50’s at the corners for close in work, all in dual purpose mounts.
The air force has a bomb with smart sub-munitions. The 40 sub-munitions, once released, can independently seek and track on tanks.
How hard would it be to have a version launched as a ship’s missile, that could take out a swarm of small boats?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY9gojFu-_U
This doesn’t seem to be too huge a problem, for which there could be a simple or complex solution.
The complex solution is the development of a new cluster munition like the CBU-97 Sensor Fuzed Weapon, which dropped 10 munitions, each of which had their own parachute and guidance system, looking for the tops of tanks on the battlefield and steering to it. It then used a shaped charge to blow a hole through the lid on the turret.
Its munitions were far larger and armor piercing, than what you would need to blow a hole a few feet across through the hull of a small boat. So you could put a lot more such munitions in a single cluster bomb.
A much easier technique is to use an airburst propane bomb.
At altitude over the target, it spins and sprays a big cloud of propane, then ignites it. This causes an implosion that changes the air pressure in about a half square mile area from 1 atmosphere, to near vacuum, to a dozen atmospheres in a second or two. This is harmful to people, and would likely knock out every boat in that half square mile area all at once.
shouldn’t this information be classified ..??
amazing how information of troop/ship/carrier movements and intentions grets publicized....
loose lips sink ships.....
You mean the under-armed Little Crappy Ships can’t fight back?