500 strikes. Billions in 💸! Are we winning, yet? Listen, folks...

I get that the Warthogs were brought in to hunt the drone ships (which means "a significant number" is tied up there now; great).

I'll go as far as to claim that the USVs that are in use in the Strait now are partially planned as bait.

Iran has an insane amount of KNOWN speedboats. Thousands. Hundreds with anti-aircraft missiles. A total of 120 vessels are reported to have been sunk by US forces, most of them large (your mileage may vary on that count, depending who you follow/believe). 30 of them had missile launchers.

To think that you can protect shipping and hunt all of these small speedboats and unmanned surface vessels and various mines and USVs is borderline nuts, excuse my French.

They are easily concealed, they are insanely fast, and the men on board are not going to abort mission when they see an enemy ship or aircraft.

And there are tens of thousands of sailors in the Iranian navies. Tens.of.thousands. Are you listening?

An hour of flight of a Warthog costs about $20k. The airframe costs about the same amount in millions when adjusted for inflation.

A Magura reportedly costs ten times that...

When sold to Americans. MoDs are deaf and blind to the meaning of supply chain scalability and cost-exchange ratio. An hour of work costs on average $22-37 in the US. Less than tenth of that in Ukraine. And half of that in Iran. Tons of industrial capacity remains.

500 strikes on ships. The tanker in the video is a US one. These "obliterated" Iranians are putting up quite the fight with their ghost ships, aren't they? Sorrynotsorry to rub it in, but somebody needs to rub it in, and I might as well get more trolling in my inbox, because SOMETHING needs to change ASAP!

Where are the large-scale shifts in procurement by EU nations towards unmanned systems? A couple hundred million here, a couple tens of millions there... peanuts.

No way can they effectively close the Strait, a naval officer said to me. Not with those tiny boats.

The total cost in terms of ripple effects of this war of underestimation of unmanned systems is so high that economists are still struggling to wrap their heads around it.

It's not very hard to convert a speedboat into a USV and steer it from a nearby manned speedboat, which can serve as the repeater.

What exactly is anybody winning here?

EU MoDs, ARE YOU LISTENING?

How many frigates are we procuring right now? 40? 50? Just so that Admirals "get my name on a real ship when I retire, and not on such a sloop" (an Admiral to me a while ago).

The cost of the cumulative arrogance and sluggishness of the West in accepting the most fundamental change since the invention of gunpowder will not be measurable in money.

//rant over

💪

PS: New piece on the naval war and in the Strait out on TECH WARS within the next three days. And until then I recommend "The State of Autonomy In Unmanned Ships".