There's an old saying in military circles: We're always training to fight the last war. There's something to that; most of my career as an NCO and officer was invested in training to fight the Soviet Union in Western Europe, so in my one wartime deployment, where did I go? The Middle East, into a conflict that was, frankly, a walkover.
Sometimes the rules change. That happened in the Spanish Civil War, when Germans and Soviets alike had a chance to test their new technology in combat, to develop tactics, and to make them doctrine. We're having a similar opportunity today with the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. The latest such lesson came with Ukraine's stunning drone war attack against Russian airfields and installations, and Russia's use of drones in retaliation. Drones aren't exactly a brand-new thingamajig, but their capabilities and the delivery systems used to deploy them are improving.
The U.S. is vulnerable to an attack similar to Ukraine’s Sunday surprise drone strikes inside Russian territory, defense experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Ukraine covertly transported containers full of drones deep into Russia over the course of several months, hammering a large portion of Russia’s strategic assets such as bombers and airbases when the drones were activated to attack on June 1. While the U.S. evaluated the consequences of the attack on future peace prospects, America is largely unprepared to defend against the possibility that an adversary could unleash a similar covert drone attack against key assets situated on American soil in the future, national security experts explained to the DCNF.
“We don’t have a good counter-drone system protecting key U.S. infrastructure or military assets,” Jennifer Kavanaugh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, told the DCNF. “Obviously, the military is working on it. They’re very aware of this gap. They’ve been studying it for a number of years, and there are some systems, so I don’t want to imply there’s nothing.”
We can go into the counter-drone system issue another time, perhaps, although President Trump's touted Golden Dome system is supposed to have counter-drone capabilities, too. But delivery systems, that's another story, and Ukraine may well have shown us the way to launch a drone swarm: Containers full of preprogrammed drones that open and launch on their own. The United States Navy may well have a system that can do precisely this:
Our fleet ballistic missile submarines: The "Boomers."
The current ballistic missile boats, the Ohio class, have (at the moment) 20 missile tubes, made for the Trident II D5 missile. These missiles are 44 feet long, almost 7 feet in diameter, weigh in at 130,000 pounds, and can carry a variety of crowd-pleaser warheads ranging from the 90 kiloton W76 to the thunderous 475 kiloton W88. At the moment, we have 14 of these boats in service. Each has two crews, a Blue crew and a Gold crew, to maximize the time they can spend on patrol.
Here's the question: Could these boats be loaded with drone deployment pods in place of ballistic missiles?
See Also: Russia Launches Massive Retaliatory Strikes on Kyiv
Think about it for a moment. The Ohio-class boomers are as good as invisible. Some years back, I bumped into a high school classmate of mine who had gone on to Annapolis, and then was flying anti-submarine warfare helicopters in the Navy; he informed me that hunting an American boomer was an exercise in futility, describing them as a "hole in the water."
So we have a platform that's near-impossible to detect.
Now, it seems likely that some sharp techie could design a drone deployment system of the right size to fit in one of those missile tubes. But instead of launching a missile and incinerating a city, the pod, launched from periscope depth, would float to the surface, wait a preprogrammed time to allow the boomer to leave the area, then launch however many drones you could fit in a 44x7-foot pod.
So we have a platform that can deliver drones without much danger to the delivery system's crew.
Consider also that the sub-launched drone system could launch 20 of these things. So, everything described above, x 20.
So we have a platform that can bring an amazing amount of hurt down on the bad guys.
What's more, a smaller version could be used in the vertical launch tubes or even the torpedo tubes of an attack boat.
I'm not a naval weapons designer, nor do I play one on television. But this seems like it would be doable, and would give the United States Navy an impressive new capability: Come to periscope depth, pop out a few pods of high-tech hurt, and depart the area before a thousand drones loaded with high explosives take off and proceed to their programmed targets.
It would be nice to have our military ahead of the technological curve. And, ironically, it is the conflict between a nation run by an old Soviet apparatchik and a nation that was once part of the Soviet Union that is showing us the way. Drones have some great capabilities, after all, not just in reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering, but also in destroying military facilities, vehicles, and equipment, and, yes, turning bad guys into widely scattered spare parts.
This would once again prove the old military maxim: There is no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable application of high explosives.
