Originally posted by infinityshock
you forget one thing: consequences. and…reciprocity. if the US experiences a severe enough of a situation, that is the reason the deployed subs are out there.
More like why the carrier fleets are out there. The US's utter and complete conventional military superiority probably guarantees they won't be using the nuke subs for any first strikes. And nobody is gonna nuke the US.
the technology for 'long range bird scale drones' that are a significant threat does not exist
Hybrid balloon and hydrogen endurance drones are demonstrating pretty impressive ranges and payload capacities. Then there are the cardboard drones currently being used in Ukraine that are currently very successful in recon roles. In general drones are proving hard to deal with because they move so slow and low generally. There is an old incident called Palmdale where a runaway drone needed to be shot down and 2 Scorpions extended 208 missiles without scoring a single hit on it.
small drones…as in about half the size of a lancet…in swarms are deployable now and sufficient countermeasures exist to relegate them to no more of an inconvenience than a car bomb…IED…or suicide bomber. or mass shooter. notice how there havent been any protest drones bothering airports anymore.
Airport drone countermeasures are mostly just radio jamming, GPS spoofing and radar and rf detectors, and then camera based optical detection with AI. They work great against consumer tier drones. However thinking about cheap swarms of drone balloons or similar by a nation state attacking military installations, the US would need more active defenses and significant advances in detection technologies because currently it is even hard to parse through the immense amount of space junk entering the atmosphere.
You're right that these drones are currently no more of a threat in scale than an IED but them being airborne, relatively hard to take down and numerous could be a potent combination tactically.
the populace can face zero essential supplies and cities can devolve into mad max with zero emergency services AND zero public services (sanitation…utilities…etc.) none of that will not prevent the military from being well fed with whatever fuel and sundry niceties they require.
That's where internal political fragmentation comes into play: the power to influence how resources are acquired and allocated for the MIC is the biggest pot of gold in America and that process inherently plays out slow. That's fine and ultimately not relevant to performance when the war is happening on the other side of the world. Not so if we are considering attacks upon US soil.
