Shaped charges are remarkably effective at penetrating armor, penetrating up to 7x their diameter. A 4-inch wide charge will penetrate up to 28 inches of solid steel armor, more than a WW2 battleship's armor.
I don't know how much armor a modern aircraft carrier has, but they're designed for the era of not-very-maneuverable warheads. Send it through the aircraft lifts and blow up the hangar filled with munitions and jet fuel, or punch through the bridge windows and kill the command staff.
Same goes for common tank countermeasures against HEAT rounds, like composite or reactive armor. These are both designed on the assumption that the same exact spot is not going to be hit twice, but you can program a drone to invalidate that assumption pretty easily.
SADARM is smaller than a typical toaster and weighs 12 kg.
An even smaller micro-drone could just attack a tank's gun by setting a small charge or providing blockage that would be devastating when the tank fired.
also, drones can do stupid things like fly underneath tanks, or land on them and then place a charge right up against the armour (or a vision slit, etc). Or even place a charge, back off, detonate it, then place a second charge on the same spot and detonate that. And of course a swarm can see multiple drones attack exactly the same spot on a tank's armour.
also, they don't need to destroy the tank. They just need to mess with it enough that it needs repair.
I'm not sure how this is superior to just shooting a tank with a missile.
> Or even place a charge, back off, detonate it, then place a second charge on the same spot and detonate that
Now you've halved the payload. If your drone can carry 10kg, you now have 2x 5kg bombs instead of 1x 10kg bomb. If you have a single payload, you have just a shitty, slow moving cruise missile.
> And of course a swarm can see multiple drones attack exactly the same spot on a tank's armour.
We have *guns* that attack the same spot on a Tank's armor. Let alone missiles or drones. Al Qaeda was chaining RPGs in the last war together (__literally__ a chain) that accomplishes that goal.
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The __ONLY__ advantage I can see drones having is sustaining a position for hours at a time. Missiles always fly at top speed, so you can't just "wait around" an area with a missile.
A drone with a gun can sit in a location for 4 hours waiting for the tank to come, then fire the RPG when the tank comes into position. That is, the drone plays a role similar to a modern infantry, except the drone is cheaper to make.
But as soon as you're talking "hit the same spot twice", then we're back to guns / RPGs with a chain on it. Maybe a drone can fire that gun, but... don't have the drone do the job directly.
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EDIT: The theory of "Combined Arms" means that in practice, you'll never face a lone tank. In practice, infantry move to protect tanks, and tanks move to protect infantry.
If you are a soldier who is facing an enemy army: you only have enough strength to carry one weapon. So what do you pick? An anti-tank RPG? Or an anti-infantry machine gun?
Drones seem to fit the same conundrum on both sides. I'd expect drones to be weak against small arms (a machine gun would quickly disable a drone, even if it moves at 100 mph). While RPGs are useless vs drones. Similarly, a drone has a very small payload, so it only can have a certain number of weapons.
armour underneath a tank is usually much lighter, because it's difficult to hit. Missiles have to do fancy armour-penetration stuff to get through the main armour on a tank. If you can get a shaped charge stuck to the underside of a tank, you don't need to do the fancy stuff.
> If you have a single payload, you have just a shitty, slow moving cruise missile.
yes. exactly. Except that for the cost of a single conventional cruise missile, you now have 10,000 shitty slow-moving, intelligent, able-to-do-evasive-maneuvres missiles.
> Al Qaeda was chaining RPGs in the last war together
so it works then? Imagine 10,000 RPG grenades flying by themselves, able to chain-hit a target, with no human operator in sight.
> A drone with a gun can sit in a location for 4 hours waiting for the tank to come, then fire the RPG when the tank comes into position.
The drone is the grenade. It doesn't fire the grenade. It flies to the target, attaches itself, goes bang. Next one flies to the same point, attaches, goes bang. There's thousands of them.
And the infrastructure is so much easier - the tomahawk needs a specialist launch vehicle, that is in turn vulnerable to being spotted and attacked. Drones need a backpack and a bluetooth connection (for each 100 drones or so).
