So, of course, the US military's vulnerability has only increased in spades since 2002 due to drones. All those bases in the Middle East that were supposed to help protect the countries where they were based were just ripe targets.
I think more critically, most of the US Navy feels like it's now more for show than an actual fighting force. A new aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion unit cost, but $120 billion total program cost. An Iranian Shahed drone costs about $35,000. So at about 2-3% of just the unit cost of an aircraft carrier, I could buy 10,000 Shahed drones. I don't even know how an aircraft carrier would begin to defend itself against an onslaught of thousands of drones.
In the joke of "Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses", clearly the 100 duck-sized horses is the winning strategy.
That said, I wonder why you don't see Ukraine and Russia doing this more -- "saving up" for massive clouds of long range strike drones every couple weeks, instead of sending out a couple hundred every night.
Naval anti-ship drones have been around for many decades. This is a highly evolved area of military technology with a long history of real-world engagements upon which to base design choices.
The standard naval anti-ship drones are Harpoon, Exocet, and similar. These are qualitatively more capable than a Shahed and you still need a swarm of them to get through.
Yes, aircraft carriers aren't nearly as unstoppable as they were in WWII, but they are still the most versatile mobile platforms the world has for projecting force around the globe.
One thing to consider is that Van Riper summoned assets unrealistically he used small boats to avoid detection but then attributed load outs that they couldn't realistically carry.
He also moved information unrealistically assuming that his units could communicate as efficently with paper moved by hand as they could with radios.
There are real, valid criticisms of the lessons we should have learned from the exercise, but it's not as simple as most analyses make it out to be.
Have there really been no other more interesting war games in the last quarter-century, or did all the negative attention this got just result in us never hearing about another one?
This one shows the the US narrowly winning against China in a conflict over Taiwan. The US wins but with tremendous losses -- specifically in the form many munitions that take years to decades to replace.
And it just so happens that we witnessed a conflict play out just a few months ago and that resulted in a similar depletion of munitions albeit with minimal losses of American ships and aircraft.
What's very troubling about this is that in response the US moved munitions from the pacific into the middle east, leaving Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in a very vulnerable position.
This may explain why the current US president was particularly obsequious to the leader of China when in the past he had been particularly bellicose.
Also, cool fact: While researching this subject I learned that the engines for most American cruise missiles come from a single company.[1]
[0] https://chinaselectcommittee.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/se...
Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected."
For ex $300k antiship missiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mission_Affordable_Capac...
The findings of the newly released postmortem from the $250 million Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise foreshadowed “the very challenges the United States would face in... other conflicts since then,” according to Jones, who is FOIA director at the Post."