Why carrier strike groups cannot affordably stop cheap drones — and what it means for American naval dominance
The US Navy's Red Sea campaign proved it can intercept Iranian-designed drones. It also proved that each successful intercept costs a hundred times more than the weapon it destroys. This cost-exchange crisis threatens the sustainability of carrier-based power projection worldwide.
When the Shield Costs More Than the Sword
On October 19, 2023, the USS Carney fired its weapons systems for ten straight hours, engaging fifteen drones and four cruise missiles in what the Navy called its most intense surface combat since the Second World War. The attackers were Houthi-launched variants of Iranian Shahed drones — devices worth perhaps $20,000 apiece. The interceptors were Standard Missiles and Evolved SeaSparrows costing between $1m and $5m each. The Carney won the engagement. It lost the exchange rate.
That disparity is not a budgetary footnote. It is the central strategic fact confronting the United States Navy, and by extension, every assumption underpinning American power projection since 1945. A carrier strike group — nine escort ships, eighty aircraft, 6,700 sailors, operating costs north of $6.5m per day — was designed to project overwhelming force against peer competitors. It was never designed to swat away $20,000 flying lawnmowers at a ratio of a hundred to one. Yet that is precisely the fight the Red Sea delivered.
The implications ripple well beyond the Gulf of Aden. They reach into Congressional appropriations committees, Indo-Pacific war planning, Chinese military laboratories, and the fundamental question of whether the capital ship — history’s most expensive military asset — can survive the era of disposable weapons.
Expensive Locks, Cheap Keys
The layered air-defence architecture protecting a carrier strike group is a masterwork of Cold War engineering. Aegis-equipped destroyers and cruisers provide long-range detection and engagement using SM-2 and SM-6 missiles. Medium-range coverage comes from Evolved SeaSparrow Missiles (ESSM). Close-in, the Phalanx CIWS — a radar-guided 20mm Gatling gun — provides terminal defence. Electronic warfare suites round out the stack, jamming and decoying incoming threats. Each layer hands off to the next. Against Soviet-era anti-ship cruise missiles, this architecture was formidable.
Against a $20,000 drone made of plywood, fibreglass, and a modified lawn-mower engine, it is like using a concert grand piano to hammer nails. The piano works. But not for long.
The Shahed-136 cruises at 185 km/h — slower than a Cessna. It carries a 50 kg warhead over a 2,500 km range. Its radar cross-section is tiny, its infrared signature minimal, and its flight profile low enough to exploit radar clutter over water. These are not features that defeat Aegis. They are features that exhaust it. Every engagement burns a missile that takes months to replace from an industrial base producing SM-6s at roughly 500 per year.
Vice Admiral Brendan McLane laid out the arithmetic after the Red Sea campaign: 220 missiles and 160 five-inch shells expended across 380 separate engagements since November 2023. Twenty-six vessels rotated through the theatre. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower’s strike group conducted its longest sustained combat deployment in decades. At no point was a carrier hit. At every point, the defenders were spending faster than the attackers.
This is what cost-exchange asymmetry looks like in practice. An SM-2 costs roughly $2m. A Shahed costs between $10,000 and $50,000 domestically. Iran and its proxies can produce drones on timelines measured in days, using automotive-grade components sourced from global commercial supply chains. The US Navy cannot reload its vertical launch cells at sea. It must withdraw to port, a process that removes a combatant from the fight for weeks.
The conventional wisdom holds that quality defeats quantity. In the Red Sea, quality intercepted quantity — but at a rate that converts tactical success into strategic erosion.
A Thermodynamic Problem
Frame the challenge differently. Every warship is a closed thermodynamic system. It carries a fixed magazine of kinetic energy — missiles, shells, fuel for aircraft. It dissipates that energy defending itself. It cannot replenish at sea. The adversary, meanwhile, operates an open system: cheap drones manufactured onshore, launched from dispersed sites, requiring no recovery. The carrier strike group behaves like a rechargeable battery fighting a river.
This asymmetry is not about technology. It is about architecture. The CSG was built for a world in which threats were expensive, scarce, and launched from platforms that could be targeted in return. Soviet bombers carrying anti-ship missiles were themselves high-value assets; sinking one removed both the platform and its weapons. A Houthi drone launcher is a truck. Destroy it, and another appears.
The Navy’s own Navigation Plan 2024 acknowledges this bind. It identifies “Terminal Defense” and “Contested Logistics” as two of five key capability priorities, with readiness for conflict with China by 2027 as the governing deadline. The document amounts to an institutional confession: the fleet’s defensive architecture and its supply chain were designed for different wars.
Consider what “contested logistics” means for a carrier strike group facing drone saturation. A Ticonderoga-class cruiser carries 122 vertical launch cells. An Arleigh Burke destroyer carries 90 or 96. Once emptied, those cells require pierside crane operations to reload — a process no combatant wants to undertake within range of the threat it is defending against. In the Red Sea, where Houthi launch sites sit along the Yemeni coast, the geometry forces defenders into a grim rotation: fight, withdraw, reload, return. Each cycle concedes time and presence.
Against China, the geometry worsens. The Taiwan Strait is roughly 130 km wide. The South China Sea stretches across shipping lanes carrying goods worth trillions annually. Chinese military researchers have watched the Red Sea campaign with the attention of doctoral students reviewing a dissertation. They have already launched a prototype drone carrier. The lesson they are drawing is not subtle: force the Americans to defend, and their magazines become the decisive constraint.
From Decisive Battle to Peasant War
Naval strategists have spent centuries worshipping the decisive engagement — Trafalgar, Midway, the Falklands. The carrier strike group is the embodiment of this doctrine: concentrate overwhelming force, achieve sea control, project power ashore. It assumes the enemy will present high-value targets. It assumes engagements will be intense but finite. It assumes that winning the battle wins the campaign.
Drone warfare inverts every assumption. It replaces the decisive engagement with attrition by a thousand cuts. It refuses to present valuable targets. It stretches engagements across months. It turns defence into the principal cost centre, not offence. The pattern echoes something older than Mahan’s doctrine of sea power — it resembles what military theorists have long called peasant war, where the weaker party wins by refusing to fight on the stronger party’s terms.
Iran grasps this instinctively. Its drone programme was never designed to sink a carrier. It was designed to make carrier operations so expensive, so logistically taxing, and so politically fraught that the carrier’s presence becomes a liability rather than an asset. The Shahed-136’s 2,500 km range means launch sites can sit deep inland, beyond the reach of ship-based retaliation without escalation into a broader conflict. The Shahed-131, smaller and shorter-ranged, fills the gap with a 15 kg warhead at even lower cost.
The Houthis demonstrated how this works in practice. They are not a navy. They possess no ships worth sinking. Their anti-ship operations cost a fraction of the defensive response they provoke. War risk insurance premiums for Red Sea shipping spiked so dramatically that commercial vessels began routing around the Cape of Good Hope — adding days, fuel, and cost to global supply chains. The Houthis achieved a form of sea denial without a single warship.
The structural parallel to distributed network topologies used by Sephardic traders evading centralized naval powers in the sixteenth century is not accidental. Dispersed, low-cost, expendable nodes have always been the natural counter to concentrated, expensive, irreplaceable ones. What has changed is that drone technology has made this counter available to non-state actors operating on budgets smaller than a single destroyer’s annual maintenance costs.
The Industrial Base Cannot Keep Pace
Strip away doctrine and strategy, and the problem reduces to production rates. The United States currently manufactures roughly 500 SM-6 missiles per year, a figure it is struggling to increase. Tomahawk production targets roughly 1,000 per year. The Red Sea campaign consumed more than 200 missiles in just over a year of operations — against a non-state actor employing a fraction of the drone inventory that Iran itself holds, let alone what China could deploy.
Scale this to a Pacific contingency. Analysts at CSIS have warned that a conflict involving China would burn through the Navy’s missile inventory in days, not months. Replenishment would require an estimated $2bn in additional funding and years of expanded production. The industrial base that produces these weapons is not a wartime arsenal; it is a peacetime boutique, optimised for low-rate production of exquisitely complex systems.
Iran’s drone factories, by contrast, operate on automotive-scale economics. Components are commercial-grade. Assembly lines are dispersible. Export versions sell for around $193,000; domestic production costs a fraction of that. Russia has already integrated Shaheds into its campaign against Ukraine, demonstrating that these weapons transfer easily across theatres. The production asymmetry is not a gap. It is a canyon.
The Navy recognises this. Directed-energy weapons — shipboard lasers like HELIOS and the 300kw HELCAP system — represent the institutional bet on breaking the cost-exchange ratio. A laser engagement costs pennies in electricity compared to millions per missile. But directed-energy systems bring their own thermodynamic constraints: waste heat must be dissipated, power generation must be sustained, and atmospheric conditions affect beam propagation. These are engineering problems, not physics impossibilities — but they will not be solved at fleet scale before the 2027 deadline the Navy has set itself.
The gap between threat and remedy is temporal, and time favours the proliferator.
What Breaks First
Continue on the current trajectory and three things fracture in sequence.
First, magazine depth. A sustained drone campaign forces CSGs to expend irreplaceable missiles at rates the industrial base cannot match. Each engagement degrades future readiness. Fleet commanders face an impossible triage: defend against today’s threat and risk being unarmed for tomorrow’s.
Second, operational presence. The reload problem forces warships out of theatre. Gaps in coverage invite escalation by adversaries and anxiety among allies. The credible threat of American naval power depends on being there; a carrier in Norfolk reloading missiles deters nobody in the South China Sea.
Third, deterrence itself. Deterrence rests on the adversary’s belief that retaliation is certain and devastating. When the cost of provoking a response is a few thousand dollars in drone parts, and the cost of that response is millions in interceptors and weeks of withdrawn presence, the calculus tilts. Deterrence becomes a wasting asset, its credibility leaking out like pressure from a cracked vessel.
China is watching, and learning. Its drone-swarm research has accelerated since the Houthi campaign began. The People’s Liberation Army Navy does not need to sink an American carrier to neutralise one. It needs to make the carrier’s presence so consumptive that the logistics tail becomes the centre of gravity — and then threaten the tail. In a Taiwan scenario, Chinese land-based drones and missiles operating from the mainland enjoy the same open-system advantage that Houthi launchers enjoy from Yemen, at vastly greater scale and sophistication.
The nightmare is not a carrier sinking. It is a carrier rendered operationally irrelevant: present but unable to project power because its escorts have emptied their magazines defending against threats that cost less than their catering budgets.
Three Levers, Three Costs
Breaking this cycle requires intervention at one of three points. Each carries real trade-offs.
The Pentagon should accelerate directed-energy deployment at the expense of legacy missile procurement. Lasers and high-powered microwave systems offer the only credible path to cost-sustainable defence against drone saturation. The Navy’s HELIOS and HELCAP programmes need wartime urgency, not peacetime acquisition timelines. The trade-off: redirecting funds from proven missile systems to immature laser technology means accepting reduced capability in the near term against the threats that exist today. If directed energy underperforms at sea — and salt air, humidity, and vibration are unforgiving test environments — the fleet will have sacrificed missiles it needed for lasers it cannot yet rely on.
The Navy should adopt distributed fleet architectures that reduce the value of any single target. The Navigation Plan’s emphasis on Distributed Maritime Operations and its goal of a 381-ship fleet point in this direction. Uncrewed surface and subsurface vessels can absorb defensive tasks without risking 6,700 lives. Smaller, cheaper platforms dispersed across wider areas deny the adversary the concentrated target that makes drone saturation effective. The trade-off: distributed forces are harder to command, harder to sustain logistically, and lack the concentrated striking power that makes a carrier group formidable. A navy of many small vessels may be harder to kill but also harder to use.
Congress should fund munitions production as a strategic reserve, not an annual appropriation. The current model treats missile procurement like office supplies — ordered as needed, subject to annual budget cycles. A conflict-ready industrial base requires pre-positioned stockpiles, surge production capacity maintained in peacetime, and long-term contracts that give manufacturers certainty to invest in expanded facilities. The trade-off: this costs billions in peacetime for weapons that may never be fired. It competes directly with shipbuilding, readiness funding, and every other Navy priority. Storing thousands of missiles invites questions about whether the money might have been better spent preventing the conflicts that would require them.
No single lever suffices. All three must be pulled simultaneously, which means the real constraint is not technological but political: whether Congress and the Pentagon can sustain three expensive, partially redundant bets over a decade of peacetime budgets.
What Will Actually Happen
The likeliest outcome is incremental adaptation — too slow for the threat timeline, too fast for budget comfort. Directed-energy weapons will deploy in small numbers aboard select vessels by the late 2020s, providing localised relief but not fleet-wide transformation. Distributed operations will be rehearsed in exercises and partially implemented, constrained by a shipbuilding industrial base that already cannot meet its own targets. Munitions production will increase, but not to the levels a Pacific conflict would demand.
The carrier strike group will remain the centrepiece of American naval power for at least another generation — not because it is optimally suited to the emerging threat environment, but because no institution voluntarily retires its most prestigious asset. The Navy will adapt around the edges while defending the core. This is not irrational. Carriers do things nothing else can. But the gap between what the carrier represents and what the threat demands will widen.
Iran and its proxies have demonstrated something that strategists will study for decades: you do not need to defeat a navy to neutralise one. You need to make its operations unsustainable. A $20,000 drone cannot sink a carrier. A thousand of them can empty the magazines of every ship protecting it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can the US Navy actually shoot down Iranian drones? A: Yes. The Red Sea campaign demonstrated high intercept rates across 380 engagements. The problem is not capability but sustainability — each successful intercept costs roughly a hundred times more than the drone it destroys, and the missiles expended take months to replace.
Q: How much does it cost to operate a carrier strike group? A: Daily operating costs exceed $6.5m, encompassing fuel, personnel, maintenance, and flight operations for approximately 6,700 crew across nine escort ships and an air wing of roughly 80 aircraft. Sustained combat operations in the Red Sea pushed costs substantially higher due to weapons expenditure.
Q: Why can’t warships reload their missiles at sea? A: Vertical launch cells — the armoured tubes that house shipboard missiles — require pierside crane operations to reload. No current underway replenishment capability exists for VLS reloading. This forces warships to withdraw from combat zones for days or weeks to rearm, creating gaps in defensive coverage.
Q: Will laser weapons solve the drone threat? A: Potentially, but not soon. Programmes like HELIOS and the 300kw HELCAP system promise near-zero marginal cost per engagement. However, they face challenges including waste heat dissipation, power generation demands, and atmospheric interference. Fleet-scale deployment is unlikely before the late 2020s at the earliest.
The Rust Never Sleeps
History offers a precise analogy, though not the one most strategists reach for. The great fortification programmes of the seventeenth century — Vauban’s star forts, the Lines of Torres Vedras — represented staggering investments in defensive architecture. Each was rendered obsolete not by a superior fortress but by a change in the nature of attack: mobile artillery that could be produced faster and cheaper than walls could be built. The fortress did not fall. It became irrelevant.
The carrier strike group is the most powerful naval fortress ever constructed. Its escorts carry more firepower than most nations’ entire armed forces. Its aircraft can strike targets a thousand kilometres away. Its mere presence has shaped the behaviour of nations for three-quarters of a century.
But the question it now faces is not whether it can win engagements. The USS Carney proved it can. The question is whether it can keep winning them — day after day, month after month, against an adversary whose weapons cost less than a mid-range sedan and whose production lines run on commercial components available in any industrial city on earth. The answer will determine not just the future of American naval power, but the architecture of global order that rests upon it.
Sources & Further Reading
The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:
- Stars and Stripes: Red Sea Operations Data - Operational statistics on Navy engagements and missile expenditure in the Red Sea campaign
- CSIS: Cost and Value of Air and Missile Defense Intercepts - Analysis of cost-exchange dynamics in contemporary missile defence
- CRS: Navy Shipboard Lasers Report - Congressional research on directed-energy weapon programmes including HELIOS and HELCAP
- Chief of Naval Operations Navigation Plan 2024 - Strategic priorities including terminal defence and contested logistics
- USNI Proceedings: Toward an Antifragile Naval Culture - Institutional reform arguments for Navy adaptation
- Center for Maritime Strategy: The Denial Navy - Strategic concept for American maritime security in contested environments
- The National Interest: Making the US Navy Antifragile - Distributed architecture and resilience concepts
- DTIC: Theory of Radar Target Discrimination - Technical challenges in detecting low-observable aerial threats
- Wikipedia: HESA Shahed 136 - Specifications, costs, and proliferation of Iran’s primary export drone
