US Navy Red Sea Commander Says “Magazine Depth” Needed to Stop Drone Swarm Attacks

The following piece first appeared on Warrior Maven, a Military Content Group member website.

Countless civilians and maritime warriors were saved from certain death in recent months by US Navy warships on patrol in the Red Sea, and warfare commanders are now looking closely to implement many critical combat lessons learned from months of successfully tracking and destroying incoming Houthi anti-ship cruise missiles and drones. US Navy radar and tracking systems, ISR, and layered ship defenses such as interceptors, deck-mounted guns, and surface-to-air targeting all functioned with great precision during months of maritime combat, during which training sailors withstood the pressure of being under constant attack. There were many instances of cruise and anti-ship missile shootdowns, as well as unprecedented surface-to-air strikes, multi-domain connectivity, and air-to-air engagement.

The US Navy continues to study and reflect upon its combat in the Red Sea with a mind to adapting tactics, strategies, and Concepts of Operation to address evolving threats. Drones and drone swarm defenses are now center stage as the Navy examines ways to further refine and improve its counter-drone targeting techniques, according to the US Navy’s Commanding Officer of Carrier Strike Group -2, which spent months in the Red Sea.

“Obviously, drones have been around for a while, and we’ve been training to deal with drones. But I think what we have started to recognize, what the Red Sea really taught us, was it’s not going to be just one or two drones; it’s going to be a lot more. So you got to be able to train to deal with a lot of those (drones),” Rear Adm. Javon “Hak” Hakimsadeh told Warrior in an interview about his Carrier Strike Group’s Red Sea deployment.

Hak’s comments are likely informing cutting-edge thinking now taking place at the Pentagon and across the services when it comes to drone defenses and countering drone swarms in particular.

“Probably the biggest consideration from a war-fighting perspective is, you know, the size of your magazine or magazine capacity. You know, you’ve got to be able to have enough bullets to be able to shoot those down,” Hak told Warrior.

Along with ensuring a sufficient magazine to counter “large numbers” of attacking drones, Hak also emphasized that the Red Sea experience is driving discussion about new tactics and methods of expanding drone defenses.

“How do we expand the options that a sailor has to be able to take care of a drone? And I think in the near term, it’s probably going to be something along the lines of a gun system or a kinetic way to do it with guns and ordnance, but the long -term, I’d love to see things like directed energy, you know, something that can just recharge and give you that almost infinite magazine size, right? You don’t have to worry about your magazine size, because if you can keep generating the power to be able to launch your directed energy, if you will. “ Hakimsadeh said.

Hakimsadeh said Navy warships greatly improved targeting tactics, something which helped multiply countermeasure options for ship-commanders and refine progressions and decision-making regarding layered ship defenses. For instance, warships used many Standard Missile interceptors before migrating slightly to air-to-air attacks given that air assets were often in an optimal position to destroy approaching drones with air-to-air weapons such as the AIM-9X. In one instance, an EA-18G Growler aircraft used an air to air weapon to destroy attacking drones.

“We started off a little bit with shooting standard missiles at those. We quickly, very quickly changed to using kind of air -to -air missiles, you know, so that’s what we talk about. We got some air-to-air kills with sidewinder variant missiles,” Hakimsadeh told Warrior.

Hakimsadeh, known as “Hak” by his Navy brethren, explained that there were many combat “firsts” for the US Navy in the Red Sea, such as the first use of key upgraded weapons systems such as the Joint Stand-Off-Weapon and Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile (AARGM). Hak specified a handful of cutting edge maritime warfare “firsts” in an essay he wrote recently for the Center for Maritime Security.

“Ideally, as a warrior, I’d want to shoot the archer before it got launched, or I would want to electronically, through some sort of non -kinetic effect, be able to kind of interfere with the command signal from the archer to that, through that particular drone. But, you know, sometimes that’s not possible. So, if they come at you, big numbers of them come at you, what you’ve got to be able to do is you’ve got to have a good -sized magazine to go after those,” Hak said.

Watch the interview with Rear Adm. Javon Hakimsadeh below.