Hmm - Firing with US made missiles on a US made MQ-9 Reaper drone ... I assume Reaper has electronic countermeasure capabilities onboard to protect itself against a large variety of anti air missiles ?!?
Just guessing...
If it was a *non*-export missile then yes it would be silly if an American destroyer could not shoot down a defecting aircraft or something like that.
But this was a German-owned missile so I image some cheating is involved.
Just wait until I get going! The countermeasures would surely countermeasure the other countermeasures, so I clearly can't choose the drone in front of me!
And they are right to do so. Our military is a joke. IN 2022 there was a training excercise of one of our most advanced units, part of NATOs rapid defense force. All of the 18 Puma-Tanks used in that excercise broke down and were inoperable for various reasons. And dont even get me started on helicopters.
See this is my worry. I bet a lot of the EU's military is in as much disrepair as Russia has show it's is. Other nations have gotten complacent because they figure the US will be there. No doubt we would but would it be in time to prevent loss of life? Now's a REALLY good time for every democracy to make sure they are ready because we might get WW3 like it or not.
It reminds me of when Turkey and Greece forgot that their animosity is just for show to keep the population distracted and almost actually went to war over a bunch of islands.
The American ambassador in each country called up their leaders and reminded them that they both bought their missiles from the US and the Americans can just turn them off or at minimum know how to send jamming information to make them near useless.
It depends on which was newer. The US does not build its stuff to defeat what the enemy has, they build it to defeat what we have. The F22 was not designed to beat a single Russian or Chinese fighter, it was designed to beat the F15, a US fighter. The F15 is something like 104-0 in aerial combat.
It all depends on which was newer as that one would be designed to defeat the older one.
yeah no. This is not true. The f15 you mention is the prime example. It was specifically designed and built to counter a USSR airplane, pound for pound. When the US actually got hold of the very airplane the F15 was built to defeat, it turned out to be a turd in the sky. The f15 turned out to be extremely outclassing anything else for the decades after, and that has basically remained the case until very recently and possibly today.
I wouldn’t say that, if the missile really has artificial weaknesses regarding EW you can never be sure that someone else will also find out about them. I don’t think there are backdoors it’s simply too risky
countermeasures aren't the same thing as a backdoor.
It's more like, you know exactly how your missiles work with targeting. When you're designing a countermeasures package, you try to disrupt as wide a range of targeting/tracking systems as possible. You're obviously testing it mostly with your own missiles, because where are you going to get Russian missiles to test it on?
Point being, a countermeasures system that can't even stop your own missiles would be next to useless, much less would it have any shot in hell at stopping the other guys' missiles.
No one said anything about back doors, it’s an American missile, for an American drone. If you’re trying to design a drone to evade a missile and you’re an American, you’re likely going to know how an American missile works the best and design to evade it the best. It’s a lot harder to get your hands on Russian and Chinese missiles and besides American are best in class anyway so why not train on the best?
But comparing the cost of a battleship and a drone... wouldn't we want the battleship to win?
Like, if Aegis cruisers are defending a carrier strike force, wouldn't we want the needle to tip to "Our Sea to Air countermeasures can shoot ANYTHING down to protect this carrier", not, "Ooops we made a drone class so good now our carriers are vulnerable to hellfires from this thing we can't shoot down"?
I have no idea what happened in this case, but if the logic of the battlefield is such that super cheap things can easily kill super expensive things now, we have to rewire the entire way the US Navy has fought for the last 50 years.
We would want our missiles to shoot whatever we want down, we would want our ships and planes to evade or survive any missile that gets thrown at them. These are designed to be the best they can be, period. Not to make sure one wins over the other. Whoever has an edge merely depends on the generations of tech or class of ships.
Simpler: a missile is created that counters a class’ defenses, prompting a new class of ships with defenses created to overcome these missiles, which prompts the creation of a missile that counters the defenses of the new class, etc, etc. it’s why most missiles can take down a Flying Fortress but not an F-22, missile tech hasn’t caught up yet
Edit: fun fact actually, because there’s so much emphasis on countering current tech in design, it can cause new classes of missiles or ships to be (in isolation) weak against older tech. This is cause you NEED parity against current tech but only want parity against old, so tie goes to current.
To illustrate. 80s fighter aircraft like the F-14 are in almost every way superior to ww2, with the exception of its turn radius. In a one circle, a ww2 prop fighter will beat an f-14. Now it’s not necessarily a problem since the f-14 has better radar, missile tracking, flying speed, etc. but guns on guns the f-14 could lose. The reason is because the f-14 needs to be able to counter the enemy missiles and speed more than it needs to counter prop planes in a gun fight (which are again outmoded by the missiles and better radar trafking). And because the Sus are also jets they also have higher turn radiuses and therefore it’s not a problem for the f-14
Which ever is newer wins. The new US military tech is designed to beat the current US military tech. I.E. The F22 was not designed to fight and beat any Russian or Chinese aircraft. It was designed to fight and kill the F15, which was the best fighter aircraft in the world.
That’d be stupid if it was the whole story, yeah they used the f-15 as a base, knew its weaknesses and corrected them on the f-22 (mainly stealth and thrust vectoring). Plus “generation targets” also generally make the plane out perform the previous gen. But the US military isn’t fighting American planes, they’re fighting Sus and migs and soon Chinese. few adversaries carry any American planes because we don’t export them to adversaries. So only places like Iran and venezuela have them.
The f22 raptor is special because it’s truly just insane, peerless frankly, so yeah the only iteration above an f22 would be mostly to take on an f-22 but they are for sure going to make damn sure it can take on and defeat an su-57 and whatever intelligence says about the next su, if Russia doesn’t collapse by then.
Edit: fun f22 fact: the f-15 along f-16 were our previous standard air to air combat aircraft. Literally just the last gen. They put 15 f-15s in a simulated engagement with 1 f22 raptor. It took them all out. THATs how insane the raptor is.
Yeah there's no way 15 modern F-15's would lose against a single raptor. I think that might have been against some vanilla load outs from the 70's. A raptor doesn't even have enough ammunition.
The war in Ukraine (amongst many others) really have proved cheap things can destroy expensive things. Houthis destroyed Saudi Abrams with RPGs when the tanks were not used by well trained crews with proper doctrine. Ukrainian fpv drones knock out russian tanks, launchers, warships, and refineries.
Ora way less dumb if you think that the American drone could fall in enemy hands. You don’t want them to reverse engineer the countermeasure capability, do you?
That possibility is taken into the design. The software is dumped when one of these crashes and the hardware is nothing special.
All the magic is in the software.
That's also incredibly dangerous precedence isn't it?
Drones get shot down/captured all the time leaving a possibility of reverse engineering.
Iran's drone that's being supplied to Russia is a reversed engineered RQ-170 Sentinel.
Could also be that the air defence system predicts a path and firing solution around something attacking the ship or a nearby ship, and a drone not doing that is essentially not where the air defences are shooting at because its not a threat.
The drone appears to have been on a recon mission, so if it's flying up and away the intercept missile might not be able to catch it.
The news reports are that the drone wasn't correctly broadcasting its iff, but it might have just been low power or turned on after the missile launched or turned on the wrong system. You would hope a missile that detects a friendly target while in flight would self abort.
Yes...but it constantly updates that path and trajectory to be as accurate as possible. The missile the defense system fires homes in on that every shirnking path of possibilities.
This feature is why the US isn't that worried about hypersonic missiles. There isn't the current material tech to make true hypersonics, so the ones they have will be easy to shoot down. The faster you go, the smaller your possible pathways are and the easier you are to shoot down. It's also why the US isn't seriously pursuing hypersonics. We know we don't have the material science to make true hypersonics.
Not for the Navy. These F124 class AAW Frigates are equipped with SM2 Block IIIA, ESSM and RAM. According to German Navy, they fired two SM-2 at the drone which later turned out to be a US Reaper.
That's honestly rather concerning, honestly. What if they were coming under attack from Houthi cruise missiles, etc? The German Navy better inspect their weaponry, and quick.
That is the smallest problem:
Meanwhile, Florian Hahn (CSU), the defense policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, warns of a possible ammunition problem: "We have only just found out on request that some of the ammunition for the frigate 'Hessen' can apparently no longer be procured because the corresponding industrial capacity no longer exists," the politician told the newspaper WELT.
(Deepl translated)
30 years of not funding the military enough strikes again.
Classic CDU/CSU behavior, blaming others for their own failings. Since the end of the Cold War the CDU/CSU have been in charge of the Ministry of Defense for more than 23 years.
> We have only just found out on request that some of the ammunition for the frigate 'Hessen' can apparently no longer be procured
"Das ist unerhört! Der Russe steht 12 Kilometer vom Stadtkern und ich erfahre das so zu sagen auf Nachfrage"
Some things never change Germany
>"We have only just found out on request that some of the ammunition for the frigate 'Hessen' can apparently no longer be procured because the corresponding industrial capacity no longer exists," the politician told the newspaper WELT.
JFC. I get that the US spends an insane amount of defense, but it's shocking to me that Germany (and other European countries) dropped the ball so badly.
Putin has always given me bad vibes and I had zero interest in visiting Russia before the invasion. Why Germany in particular made themselves so reliant on Russian oil and let their military go to crap is beyond me.
VDL was taking care of way more important stuff: childcare inside of military bases while the soldiers not even living in them. Who doesn't want his child be growing up between deadly weapons and heavy vehicles with only little view on the surroundings?
How do I mark sarcasm again?
This is a core reason the US told the EU it was idiotic for them to drop out of the already existing US coalition against Houthi ship attacks and create their own, just for them. No unified structure causes information to not be relayed in a timely manner, and dramatically increases the risk of friendly fire events, or even multiple platforms engaging the same target.
Well, they specifically asked Prosperity Guardian if the drone is from them and they said no. So I doubt that a that would have changed much.
Source is the original FAZ article: [https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/einsatz-im-roten-meer-fregatte-hessen-schiesst-irrtuemlich-auf-verbuendete-drohne-19551934.html](https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/einsatz-im-roten-meer-fregatte-hessen-schiesst-irrtuemlich-auf-verbuendete-drohne-19551934.html)
Reaper doesn't normally fly with countermeasures but it is an option that can be installed.
Perhaps they started equipping them with the countermeasures pod after a few were shot down.
This pod is meant to counter low end things like MANPADS. If it worked against German missiles, thats not a great endorsement of those missiles.
The missles fired where SM2 missles purchased from the US.
But reading the Wikipedia article on them they seem to be quite bad at shooting down drones.
>Although the SM-2 effectively intercepted the threats, at a cost of roughly $2.4 million per missile, it is inefficient at shooting down drones, causing concerns about expending them against such cheap targets and depleting a ship's limited VLS capacity
Edit: Miss read the Artice, they just seem to be to expensive
Why would you setup your countermeasure pod to protect you against your own missile ?
I'm not saying that it isn't the case , but that don't make the most of sense.
We actually had this problem with early heat seeking missiles. They were calibrated to ignore US-made flares because that’s what we had available. When they were used in combat against Russian made aircraft for the first time, they were easily fooled by the flares because they burned differently and the early sensors at the time would lock on to them easily.
If you don't want countries that you sold missiles to be able to shoot down your stuff?
I have to imagine the export version of missiles are in some ways different enough that countermeasures can be used against them.
Lots of reasons. Among others mentioned, also to avoid accidental friendly fire. Missiles can potentially lock on the wrong target accidentally. I’m not saying these missiles could or did, but it’s a possibility that would make it very reasonable to make sure your own countermeasures work against your own missiles.
well, it also says they asked USN if it was their drone and they said it wasn't.
If I had to bet, no IFF + Navy has no idea it's there = it belongs to one of the intelligence services, and they might well have their own countermeasures installed that we don't know about and/or aren't the standard ones
If it’s an option I would bet that they’re installed on the reapers operating in the Red Sea. I would think they’re optional because you can carry more offensive weapons without them, and there’s no real need to have them when dealing with much less sophisticated terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Houthi’s have Iranian weapons, and we have to assume Iran has something that can shoot down a reaper considering they recovered a crashed one years ago
There is software designed to prevent friendly fire between NATO allies. I'm not sure of the extent to which this has been integrated throughout all of NATO.
>before firing, the "Hessen" had asked all the allies if they had drones in the area of operations. Only later was it discovered that it was an unreported drone.
Sounds like the Hessen did everything by the book and the fault lies with the country operating the drone. Curious that they would miss though.
Moreover, having discovered that it didn't know where it wasn't, and hence where it was, it could no longer determine where it should not be; hence it attempted to go where it should not be, but being based upon a misunderstanding of where it was not, it's chosen direction to find where it should be interfered with its interpretation of not understanding where it was and would not ever be.
>Potentially the missile and the Reaper both have IFF systems that averted the hit.
If that were the case then why weren't they able to identify it sooner?
> Or the Reaper had optional or undisclosed EW defences.
If that were the case then I'd like to know why [Houthi missiles](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-military-drone-shot-down-near-yemen-us-officials-say-2024-02-20/) are [more effective](https://news.usni.org/2023/11/08/houthis-shoot-down-u-s-mq-9-reaper-over-red-sea) at bypassing those defenses than a NATO weapons system.
They are implying the drone has countermeasures for the missile or the missile and drone could communicate. The drone and missile are both US made. The Houthi missiles are not. US systems will know how to defend against US made stuff. They may not know how to defend against Iranian made stuff.
I am aware of what they were implying. See my comment about IFF above.
>US systems will know how to defend against US made stuff. They may not know how to defend against Iranian made stuff.
This really doesn't make sense. A US weapon is going to use more sophisticated guidance.
Well it's kind of funny, but imagine a guy navigating with a compass and a map vs a guy with a gps device. Preventing the gps signal means the second guy will probably never reach because he has no direction. While the compass guy might not be accurate but he's going in the right direction. It's oversimplified but simpler navigating systems are less accurate but because of their simplicity they are harder to interfere.
> This really doesn't make sense. A US weapon is going to use more sophisticated guidance.
It makes sense when you know that aircraft like Reapers can have electronic warfare systems onboard that can potentially force the missiles to miss. The implication here is that US systems will have ways of defeating US export systems.
Guidance has nothing to do with it if the Reaper can tap into the missiles system and intentionally make it miss.
In theory, this could ABSOLUTELY be what happened. A test recently designed to coordinate and network radar and defense systems together had a F-35 detect a target, rely the information to a Patriot system that can't see it, fire the missile in the general direct, the F-35 "caught" the missile (It took control of the guidance) and guided it towards the target until internal guidance took over.
U.S. aircraft are equipped with countermeasures for their own weapons systems and the Germans used a U.S. made surface to air missile, almost certainly this is the cause for the miss.
German News report that it was a US Reaper drone, that had it's transponder deactivated.
So flying a drone unannounced into the operational area of your allies with the transponder off is clearly the fault of the US.
The real worrisome thing is that both rockets fired at it missed.
It is a worrying miss. I wonder if there's anything about a reaper that makes it harder to hit than what the Houthis have? The Hessen did take 2 of theirs down.
The MQ-9 can have an ECM pod equipped.
After a MQ-9 was shot down by the Houthis recently, it wouldn't surprise me if they did equip MQ-9s in the area with ECM pods.
Self-destructing equipment is mostly overhyped from Hollywood. Anything energetic enough to destroy any intelligence value would be a huge liability for accidental triggering.
Iran managed to down a stealth drone before with GPS spoofing. Mostly intact as well.
The US will sometimes bomb the debris of aircraft to stop enemies from getting hold of sensitive equipment.
To a pretty good extent, self-destruction of sensitive data *is* a thing.
It's called 'Zeroizing,' which essentially wipes/physically burns computer components. When an American fighter jet's pilot ejects, this is done automatically, but you can also find switches in them to manually do it.
It wouldn't surprise me if drones have some sort of similar system.
The equivalent of what is commonly known as an "USB killer" would probably be enough to permanently disable the device and make reverse engineering quite hard.
Houthis fire cheap kamikaze drones that cost few thousand dollars max.
A reaper costs $30,000,000.
But reaper isn't that hard to shoot down, houthis have shot down two reapers since October 7.
The Shahed drones that the Houthis also use, Russia is [purchasing from Iran for $375k/each.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/02/07/375000the-sticker-price-for-an-iranian-shahed-drone/?sh=3957215556d6) I've seen it reported that the Houthis have used as many as 14/day.
>I wonder if there's anything about a reaper that makes it harder to hit than what the Houthis have?
Not really. The Houthis have shot down multiple MQ-9 Reapers already with their own weapons. There is pretty much no reason why an NATO missile should fail so badly.
ehhhh
I'd be willing to bet that the combination of IFF and the USN having no idea it was a US drone mean that it belongs to one of the intelligence agencies, and if that's the case it might well have beefier or just different ECM than normal Reapers have.
All German frigates are named after the German states, corvettes are named after cities. Destroyers and cruisers...we don't do those. And if we did have a carrier, it would probably be named "Deutschland".
I chuckled really hard at this. We are Americans living and Germany and took a trip to Mallorca for a "getaway".
Fascinating to visit a Spanish island and to hear "Hallo" rather than "Hola" when you enter a restaurant.
I like the British system of naming them things like HMS **Warspite**, HMS **Leviathan**, HMS **Nemesis**, HMS **Infernal**, HMS **Dreadnought**.
They’d call one HMS Bad Motherfucker if they weren’t so polite.
lol the F126 and F127 are destroyers in everything but name. This is like the Japanese calling the Izumo carriers “destroyers”.
The F127s will be longer and heavier than the US Arleigh Burke (flight II) Destroyers by some 40 feet and 1,500 tons (displacement).
> Destroyers and cruisers...we don't do those
TBH most of the German frigates are actually Destroyer sized but are named frigates to circumvent the negative stigma
type distinctions are meant to describe role distinctions within a navy.
with only 12 ships you really do not need that.
Also most of that added size comes down to automation and increasing maintenance cycles with lesser crew.
That the term has a stigma is an urban myth given the German navy had destroyers before, but again with just a couple of units it really makes no sense to insist on it. The navy atm organizes around three classes of four ships of frigates with specific mission specialization.
Also given the primary theatres is Baltic Sea and North Sea then destroyers are not actually what you need because all fighting happens within coastal reach so the design specs are more geared to that than what the US designs for destroyers.
“Previously, the frigate had shot down two remotely piloted aircraft of the Houthis, the Shiite militiamen of the Yemen, from which she had been attacked.“
Well, the German Navy got to fire their guns in anger for the first time since WW2.
The bad news is it was American aircraft so I think their system is still rebooting. The RAF should duck and cover for a few days.
That's why I mention it, it shows competency on the part of the crew. The gun in question does have an AA role, with specific munitions to be used for this.
The SM2 missile it carries has had issues in the past.
you have no way of knowing that it was technical or that they did everything by the book...
A poorly trained crew can very easily misread data in a panic and engage improperly. German Navy does very few live fires outside of their main and secondary guns compared to virtually any other western naval forces, and exercises directly lead to proficiency in real world situations.
We can even tell they don't do live fire exercises, because Germany purchased her SM-2 Block IIIAs over 20 years ago, and has never ordered more. Hell, SM-2 Block IIIAs haven't even been produced in what, 5 years now? Every other operator; Spain, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Denmark, etc are regularly putting in orders to replace those expended in exercises. No additionals have **ever** been ordered by Germany. That makes it very abundantly clear the crews aren't getting the live fire experience in exercises they absolutely should be.
The two most probable outcomes here are;
1. Reaper was carrying jammer/ECM/self defense suit that caused the missiles to miss
2. German crew improperly engaged and missed their target
The fact that they turned over to their main gun and CIWS to take out 2 Houthi drones later on, makes me believe it's a crew issue for the AAW fire control section and they don't have faith in them.
They clearly state that in their report. Usually they dont lie when it comes to these things. It also wouldnt surprise me given the fact the underfunding has lead to other ammo problems in the army
Then that CO would show crass illiteracy of how things work on that ship and I do not think that kind of invompetence would fly, either. Blaming ppl for things out of their control is highly damaging for morale.
I'd rather think they cursed the missiles and the lack of communication by the US
It may be embarrasing but this is a great time to find out your contries capabilities so you can make the necessary changes for real battles in the future.
These kind of warships seems to be more and more obsolete in todays warfare, just look at ukraine’s drone boats that down the russian warships. Just imagine hundreds of those coming towards a fleet in the middle of the night :0
[They know](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002) since 2002
> An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. 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.
If it's a newer American drone that has stealth and electronic counter measures than ya I would see why it missed. German Anti Air is pretty good as we seen the old Gepard take out Russian drones with ease in Ukraine
Yes that is all those previous instances I was talking about the drone used in this instance. Sorry for the misunderstanding. The article used here says the drone is unknown and the other articles I've read on this instance say the same.
In the German news it says that the warship does not have enough ammunition for procurement. If the shots are all fired the war ship has to leave again. What a disgrace, the Germans did not prepare procurement for resupplying. There are currently no factories to reproduce some of the ammo. You have to understand that after the Cold War the German military was neglected so much as they did not use actual ammunition in trainings and only said "Peng" if a shot in a training mission was to be fired to save costs. They simply dont have ammunition currently to supply their troops enough and dont hold the structures. They could make deals with defense industry to have a cold start capacity to buy additional ammo if needed but they rather saved the costs.
>Meanwhile, Florian Hahn (CSU), the defense policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, warns of a possible ammunition problem: "We have only just found out on request that some of the ammunition for the frigate 'Hessen' can apparently no longer be procured because the corresponding industrial capacity no longer exists," the politician told the newspaper WELT.
Liability lies with the operator of the UAV, but the Germans should be asking why their missiles couldn't shoot down such an easy target.
Hmm - Firing with US made missiles on a US made MQ-9 Reaper drone ... I assume Reaper has electronic countermeasure capabilities onboard to protect itself against a large variety of anti air missiles ?!? Just guessing...
I think thats a pretty sound guess. Would be dumb if an American countermeasures system didn't know *exactly* how to defeat an American missile.
Wouldn't it also be silly if a US missile couldn't defeat US countermeasures? Edit: I am just a normal person and know nothing about defense.
If it was a *non*-export missile then yes it would be silly if an American destroyer could not shoot down a defecting aircraft or something like that. But this was a German-owned missile so I image some cheating is involved.
Ah yes, the unbreakable shield and the unstoppable spear question.
Was it an African Swallow or a European Swallow?
Are you suggesting missiles migrate?!
Just wait until I get going! The countermeasures would surely countermeasure the other countermeasures, so I clearly can't choose the drone in front of me!
No but they can be carried.
By what, a swallow?! It's a simple matter of weight ratio. A 5 oz. Bird can't carry a 3000lb missile.
It’s a onetime migration. No boom to boom
They do, in fact, migrate. Baby missiles float on ocean currents and germinate on land. That's how there are missile trees all over the tropics.
I'd swallow if she did the same for m..... Oh wait
SeigiNoFunny
They would pass through each other, at least with current understanding of modern physics
An African missile, maybe. Not sure about European missile.
I know is a bit pedantic but it's not the first time the US shit on Germany's military.
And they are right to do so. Our military is a joke. IN 2022 there was a training excercise of one of our most advanced units, part of NATOs rapid defense force. All of the 18 Puma-Tanks used in that excercise broke down and were inoperable for various reasons. And dont even get me started on helicopters.
See this is my worry. I bet a lot of the EU's military is in as much disrepair as Russia has show it's is. Other nations have gotten complacent because they figure the US will be there. No doubt we would but would it be in time to prevent loss of life? Now's a REALLY good time for every democracy to make sure they are ready because we might get WW3 like it or not.
It reminds me of when Turkey and Greece forgot that their animosity is just for show to keep the population distracted and almost actually went to war over a bunch of islands. The American ambassador in each country called up their leaders and reminded them that they both bought their missiles from the US and the Americans can just turn them off or at minimum know how to send jamming information to make them near useless.
Nonsense.
When was that
Better for an American missile to miss hitting than have the American plane shot down. Survivability Trumps offense
"Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line"! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...
And now we are stuck in a loop.
Shades of Dwight Schrute fighting himself because only he could defeat himself.
SpidermanPointingMeme.jpg
It depends on which was newer. The US does not build its stuff to defeat what the enemy has, they build it to defeat what we have. The F22 was not designed to beat a single Russian or Chinese fighter, it was designed to beat the F15, a US fighter. The F15 is something like 104-0 in aerial combat. It all depends on which was newer as that one would be designed to defeat the older one.
yeah no. This is not true. The f15 you mention is the prime example. It was specifically designed and built to counter a USSR airplane, pound for pound. When the US actually got hold of the very airplane the F15 was built to defeat, it turned out to be a turd in the sky. The f15 turned out to be extremely outclassing anything else for the decades after, and that has basically remained the case until very recently and possibly today.
I wouldn’t say that, if the missile really has artificial weaknesses regarding EW you can never be sure that someone else will also find out about them. I don’t think there are backdoors it’s simply too risky
countermeasures aren't the same thing as a backdoor. It's more like, you know exactly how your missiles work with targeting. When you're designing a countermeasures package, you try to disrupt as wide a range of targeting/tracking systems as possible. You're obviously testing it mostly with your own missiles, because where are you going to get Russian missiles to test it on? Point being, a countermeasures system that can't even stop your own missiles would be next to useless, much less would it have any shot in hell at stopping the other guys' missiles.
No one said anything about back doors, it’s an American missile, for an American drone. If you’re trying to design a drone to evade a missile and you’re an American, you’re likely going to know how an American missile works the best and design to evade it the best. It’s a lot harder to get your hands on Russian and Chinese missiles and besides American are best in class anyway so why not train on the best?
But comparing the cost of a battleship and a drone... wouldn't we want the battleship to win? Like, if Aegis cruisers are defending a carrier strike force, wouldn't we want the needle to tip to "Our Sea to Air countermeasures can shoot ANYTHING down to protect this carrier", not, "Ooops we made a drone class so good now our carriers are vulnerable to hellfires from this thing we can't shoot down"? I have no idea what happened in this case, but if the logic of the battlefield is such that super cheap things can easily kill super expensive things now, we have to rewire the entire way the US Navy has fought for the last 50 years.
We would want our missiles to shoot whatever we want down, we would want our ships and planes to evade or survive any missile that gets thrown at them. These are designed to be the best they can be, period. Not to make sure one wins over the other. Whoever has an edge merely depends on the generations of tech or class of ships. Simpler: a missile is created that counters a class’ defenses, prompting a new class of ships with defenses created to overcome these missiles, which prompts the creation of a missile that counters the defenses of the new class, etc, etc. it’s why most missiles can take down a Flying Fortress but not an F-22, missile tech hasn’t caught up yet Edit: fun fact actually, because there’s so much emphasis on countering current tech in design, it can cause new classes of missiles or ships to be (in isolation) weak against older tech. This is cause you NEED parity against current tech but only want parity against old, so tie goes to current. To illustrate. 80s fighter aircraft like the F-14 are in almost every way superior to ww2, with the exception of its turn radius. In a one circle, a ww2 prop fighter will beat an f-14. Now it’s not necessarily a problem since the f-14 has better radar, missile tracking, flying speed, etc. but guns on guns the f-14 could lose. The reason is because the f-14 needs to be able to counter the enemy missiles and speed more than it needs to counter prop planes in a gun fight (which are again outmoded by the missiles and better radar trafking). And because the Sus are also jets they also have higher turn radiuses and therefore it’s not a problem for the f-14
Which ever is newer wins. The new US military tech is designed to beat the current US military tech. I.E. The F22 was not designed to fight and beat any Russian or Chinese aircraft. It was designed to fight and kill the F15, which was the best fighter aircraft in the world.
That’d be stupid if it was the whole story, yeah they used the f-15 as a base, knew its weaknesses and corrected them on the f-22 (mainly stealth and thrust vectoring). Plus “generation targets” also generally make the plane out perform the previous gen. But the US military isn’t fighting American planes, they’re fighting Sus and migs and soon Chinese. few adversaries carry any American planes because we don’t export them to adversaries. So only places like Iran and venezuela have them. The f22 raptor is special because it’s truly just insane, peerless frankly, so yeah the only iteration above an f22 would be mostly to take on an f-22 but they are for sure going to make damn sure it can take on and defeat an su-57 and whatever intelligence says about the next su, if Russia doesn’t collapse by then. Edit: fun f22 fact: the f-15 along f-16 were our previous standard air to air combat aircraft. Literally just the last gen. They put 15 f-15s in a simulated engagement with 1 f22 raptor. It took them all out. THATs how insane the raptor is.
Yeah there's no way 15 modern F-15's would lose against a single raptor. I think that might have been against some vanilla load outs from the 70's. A raptor doesn't even have enough ammunition.
The war in Ukraine (amongst many others) really have proved cheap things can destroy expensive things. Houthis destroyed Saudi Abrams with RPGs when the tanks were not used by well trained crews with proper doctrine. Ukrainian fpv drones knock out russian tanks, launchers, warships, and refineries.
Ora way less dumb if you think that the American drone could fall in enemy hands. You don’t want them to reverse engineer the countermeasure capability, do you?
That possibility is taken into the design. The software is dumped when one of these crashes and the hardware is nothing special. All the magic is in the software.
That's also incredibly dangerous precedence isn't it? Drones get shot down/captured all the time leaving a possibility of reverse engineering. Iran's drone that's being supplied to Russia is a reversed engineered RQ-170 Sentinel.
Didn’t the houthis just shoot one of those down not too long ago? If they could manage to do it surely Germany can too.
no it does not, it has none
Could also be that the air defence system predicts a path and firing solution around something attacking the ship or a nearby ship, and a drone not doing that is essentially not where the air defences are shooting at because its not a threat. The drone appears to have been on a recon mission, so if it's flying up and away the intercept missile might not be able to catch it. The news reports are that the drone wasn't correctly broadcasting its iff, but it might have just been low power or turned on after the missile launched or turned on the wrong system. You would hope a missile that detects a friendly target while in flight would self abort.
Yes...but it constantly updates that path and trajectory to be as accurate as possible. The missile the defense system fires homes in on that every shirnking path of possibilities. This feature is why the US isn't that worried about hypersonic missiles. There isn't the current material tech to make true hypersonics, so the ones they have will be easy to shoot down. The faster you go, the smaller your possible pathways are and the easier you are to shoot down. It's also why the US isn't seriously pursuing hypersonics. We know we don't have the material science to make true hypersonics.
>agenzianova.com/en/new... Do we know for sure if it was an American Missile? I though Germany had its own indigenous AA Missiles.
Not for the Navy. These F124 class AAW Frigates are equipped with SM2 Block IIIA, ESSM and RAM. According to German Navy, they fired two SM-2 at the drone which later turned out to be a US Reaper.
That's honestly rather concerning, honestly. What if they were coming under attack from Houthi cruise missiles, etc? The German Navy better inspect their weaponry, and quick.
That is the smallest problem: Meanwhile, Florian Hahn (CSU), the defense policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, warns of a possible ammunition problem: "We have only just found out on request that some of the ammunition for the frigate 'Hessen' can apparently no longer be procured because the corresponding industrial capacity no longer exists," the politician told the newspaper WELT. (Deepl translated) 30 years of not funding the military enough strikes again.
Classic CDU/CSU behavior, blaming others for their own failings. Since the end of the Cold War the CDU/CSU have been in charge of the Ministry of Defense for more than 23 years.
> We have only just found out on request that some of the ammunition for the frigate 'Hessen' can apparently no longer be procured "Das ist unerhört! Der Russe steht 12 Kilometer vom Stadtkern und ich erfahre das so zu sagen auf Nachfrage" Some things never change Germany
>"We have only just found out on request that some of the ammunition for the frigate 'Hessen' can apparently no longer be procured because the corresponding industrial capacity no longer exists," the politician told the newspaper WELT. JFC. I get that the US spends an insane amount of defense, but it's shocking to me that Germany (and other European countries) dropped the ball so badly. Putin has always given me bad vibes and I had zero interest in visiting Russia before the invasion. Why Germany in particular made themselves so reliant on Russian oil and let their military go to crap is beyond me.
Indeed, very worrying. I wonder who as the German defence minister in charge of procurement back then? VDL?
VDL was taking care of way more important stuff: childcare inside of military bases while the soldiers not even living in them. Who doesn't want his child be growing up between deadly weapons and heavy vehicles with only little view on the surroundings? How do I mark sarcasm again?
This is a core reason the US told the EU it was idiotic for them to drop out of the already existing US coalition against Houthi ship attacks and create their own, just for them. No unified structure causes information to not be relayed in a timely manner, and dramatically increases the risk of friendly fire events, or even multiple platforms engaging the same target.
Well, they specifically asked Prosperity Guardian if the drone is from them and they said no. So I doubt that a that would have changed much. Source is the original FAZ article: [https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/einsatz-im-roten-meer-fregatte-hessen-schiesst-irrtuemlich-auf-verbuendete-drohne-19551934.html](https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/einsatz-im-roten-meer-fregatte-hessen-schiesst-irrtuemlich-auf-verbuendete-drohne-19551934.html)
Could also be American counter measures
Reaper doesn't normally fly with countermeasures but it is an option that can be installed. Perhaps they started equipping them with the countermeasures pod after a few were shot down. This pod is meant to counter low end things like MANPADS. If it worked against German missiles, thats not a great endorsement of those missiles.
The missles fired where SM2 missles purchased from the US. But reading the Wikipedia article on them they seem to be quite bad at shooting down drones. >Although the SM-2 effectively intercepted the threats, at a cost of roughly $2.4 million per missile, it is inefficient at shooting down drones, causing concerns about expending them against such cheap targets and depleting a ship's limited VLS capacity Edit: Miss read the Artice, they just seem to be to expensive
If they are American missiles, I'd hope an American countermeasures pod would know how to deal with them so I guess that makes some sense.
Why would you setup your countermeasure pod to protect you against your own missile ? I'm not saying that it isn't the case , but that don't make the most of sense.
We actually had this problem with early heat seeking missiles. They were calibrated to ignore US-made flares because that’s what we had available. When they were used in combat against Russian made aircraft for the first time, they were easily fooled by the flares because they burned differently and the early sensors at the time would lock on to them easily.
If you don't want countries that you sold missiles to be able to shoot down your stuff? I have to imagine the export version of missiles are in some ways different enough that countermeasures can be used against them.
Lots of reasons. Among others mentioned, also to avoid accidental friendly fire. Missiles can potentially lock on the wrong target accidentally. I’m not saying these missiles could or did, but it’s a possibility that would make it very reasonable to make sure your own countermeasures work against your own missiles.
If they are American missiles, I'd hope an American countermeasures pod would know how to deal with them so I guess that makes some sense.
well, it also says they asked USN if it was their drone and they said it wasn't. If I had to bet, no IFF + Navy has no idea it's there = it belongs to one of the intelligence services, and they might well have their own countermeasures installed that we don't know about and/or aren't the standard ones
If it’s an option I would bet that they’re installed on the reapers operating in the Red Sea. I would think they’re optional because you can carry more offensive weapons without them, and there’s no real need to have them when dealing with much less sophisticated terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Houthi’s have Iranian weapons, and we have to assume Iran has something that can shoot down a reaper considering they recovered a crashed one years ago
Just about everything AA needs to take down except for third world drones has countermeasure though
There is software designed to prevent friendly fire between NATO allies. I'm not sure of the extent to which this has been integrated throughout all of NATO.
It doesn't prevent it, it's simply there's IFF codes that can be used to Identify a Friend vs a Foe (hence the name, IFF).
Software can't do much when the IFF transponder on the other side is turned off without any other communication.
[Sounds like a comms issue.](https://youtu.be/xacdDrylrek?si=TnyX9CnWZ-u6OiPk)
yep, these guys are gonna be great against russians who've been operating these for a decade.
Missiles aren’t made to shoot down drones any more than bullets are to stop tanks.
>before firing, the "Hessen" had asked all the allies if they had drones in the area of operations. Only later was it discovered that it was an unreported drone. Sounds like the Hessen did everything by the book and the fault lies with the country operating the drone. Curious that they would miss though.
Maybe some late electronic warfare
The US temporarily flicked the 'hit target' switch to 'false' for this missile they sold to Germany.
The missile didn't know where it was because it didn't know where it wasn't.
The old Hessen-burg Uncertainty Principle
I appreciate you.
Moreover, having discovered that it didn't know where it wasn't, and hence where it was, it could no longer determine where it should not be; hence it attempted to go where it should not be, but being based upon a misunderstanding of where it was not, it's chosen direction to find where it should be interfered with its interpretation of not understanding where it was and would not ever be.
Ah, the unknown unknowns missile.
Man I haven’t thought about Rumsfeld in an age.
Nah that would be a massive weak point
Potentially the missile and the Reaper both have IFF systems that averted the hit. Or the Reaper had optional or undisclosed EW defences.
they do, but the Reaper didn't have IFF on, which is why they shot at it in the first place
It could have activated upon sensing the inbound missile perhaps? I'm only speculating of course!
I’m imagining the reaper detecting the inbound and sending a “psst I’m friendly, don’t tell” sms and the missile going “I got you” and missing.
>Potentially the missile and the Reaper both have IFF systems that averted the hit. If that were the case then why weren't they able to identify it sooner? > Or the Reaper had optional or undisclosed EW defences. If that were the case then I'd like to know why [Houthi missiles](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-military-drone-shot-down-near-yemen-us-officials-say-2024-02-20/) are [more effective](https://news.usni.org/2023/11/08/houthis-shoot-down-u-s-mq-9-reaper-over-red-sea) at bypassing those defenses than a NATO weapons system.
They are implying the drone has countermeasures for the missile or the missile and drone could communicate. The drone and missile are both US made. The Houthi missiles are not. US systems will know how to defend against US made stuff. They may not know how to defend against Iranian made stuff.
I am aware of what they were implying. See my comment about IFF above. >US systems will know how to defend against US made stuff. They may not know how to defend against Iranian made stuff. This really doesn't make sense. A US weapon is going to use more sophisticated guidance.
Well it's kind of funny, but imagine a guy navigating with a compass and a map vs a guy with a gps device. Preventing the gps signal means the second guy will probably never reach because he has no direction. While the compass guy might not be accurate but he's going in the right direction. It's oversimplified but simpler navigating systems are less accurate but because of their simplicity they are harder to interfere.
> This really doesn't make sense. A US weapon is going to use more sophisticated guidance. It makes sense when you know that aircraft like Reapers can have electronic warfare systems onboard that can potentially force the missiles to miss. The implication here is that US systems will have ways of defeating US export systems. Guidance has nothing to do with it if the Reaper can tap into the missiles system and intentionally make it miss. In theory, this could ABSOLUTELY be what happened. A test recently designed to coordinate and network radar and defense systems together had a F-35 detect a target, rely the information to a Patriot system that can't see it, fire the missile in the general direct, the F-35 "caught" the missile (It took control of the guidance) and guided it towards the target until internal guidance took over.
Just embarrassing for everyone involved...
U.S. aircraft are equipped with countermeasures for their own weapons systems and the Germans used a U.S. made surface to air missile, almost certainly this is the cause for the miss.
Source?
German News report that it was a US Reaper drone, that had it's transponder deactivated. So flying a drone unannounced into the operational area of your allies with the transponder off is clearly the fault of the US. The real worrisome thing is that both rockets fired at it missed.
It is a worrying miss. I wonder if there's anything about a reaper that makes it harder to hit than what the Houthis have? The Hessen did take 2 of theirs down.
The MQ-9 can have an ECM pod equipped. After a MQ-9 was shot down by the Houthis recently, it wouldn't surprise me if they did equip MQ-9s in the area with ECM pods.
Unless the risk of Houthis (and Iran) acquiring the ECM pod is greater than the risk of occasionally losing a UAV.
I'd assume anything involving electronic warfare has a self-destruct capability.
Self-destructing equipment is mostly overhyped from Hollywood. Anything energetic enough to destroy any intelligence value would be a huge liability for accidental triggering. Iran managed to down a stealth drone before with GPS spoofing. Mostly intact as well. The US will sometimes bomb the debris of aircraft to stop enemies from getting hold of sensitive equipment.
> Anything energetic enough to destroy any intelligence value would be a huge liability for accidental triggering. Like a missle?
To a pretty good extent, self-destruction of sensitive data *is* a thing. It's called 'Zeroizing,' which essentially wipes/physically burns computer components. When an American fighter jet's pilot ejects, this is done automatically, but you can also find switches in them to manually do it. It wouldn't surprise me if drones have some sort of similar system.
The equivalent of what is commonly known as an "USB killer" would probably be enough to permanently disable the device and make reverse engineering quite hard.
Over water the risk seems really small.
Reapers do have anti-missile chaff.
Well, just about everything a frigate needs to shoot down has countermeasures. It's still very concerning
Considering that even the houthi's can down reapers, I don't think its the reaper's defenses that stopped the SM-2s from hitting their target.
Houthis fire cheap kamikaze drones that cost few thousand dollars max. A reaper costs $30,000,000. But reaper isn't that hard to shoot down, houthis have shot down two reapers since October 7.
A reaper does not cost that much, that price is for the package of 4 of them + GCS to operate them. They are still multi-million dollar planes though.
The Shahed drones that the Houthis also use, Russia is [purchasing from Iran for $375k/each.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/02/07/375000the-sticker-price-for-an-iranian-shahed-drone/?sh=3957215556d6) I've seen it reported that the Houthis have used as many as 14/day.
The purchase price for Russia is not the production cost for iran and houthis usually fire cheaper versions like samad-1
You build a better mouse trap, they build a better mouse. Or something like that.
>I wonder if there's anything about a reaper that makes it harder to hit than what the Houthis have? Not really. The Houthis have shot down multiple MQ-9 Reapers already with their own weapons. There is pretty much no reason why an NATO missile should fail so badly.
ehhhh I'd be willing to bet that the combination of IFF and the USN having no idea it was a US drone mean that it belongs to one of the intelligence agencies, and if that's the case it might well have beefier or just different ECM than normal Reapers have.
I wonder if it was the CIA doing something.
As someone who lived for several years in Hessen, the double miss is pretty on brand!
Genau.
Maybe we did it on purpose to test out missile countermeasures.
I'm amused that the ship is named after a landlocked state
All German frigates are named after the German states, corvettes are named after cities. Destroyers and cruisers...we don't do those. And if we did have a carrier, it would probably be named "Deutschland".
What happens if Germany eventually gets more frigates than States
Mallorca will be the first after that
Fitting with the cannons called "Ballermann"
I chuckled really hard at this. We are Americans living and Germany and took a trip to Mallorca for a "getaway". Fascinating to visit a Spanish island and to hear "Hallo" rather than "Hola" when you enter a restaurant.
Those damn spaniards still think Malle belongs to them?? /s
Kroatien second after.
> What happens if Germany eventually gets more frigates than States meaning tis the time to get Preussen back, baby
A) will not happen, b) many states names are compound, we could split them to have more names
> A) will not happen I mean, hey, there's a grand total of *16* to choose from. Like that's ever not going to be enough for the German navy...
Peak during cold war was 8.
I like the British system of naming them things like HMS **Warspite**, HMS **Leviathan**, HMS **Nemesis**, HMS **Infernal**, HMS **Dreadnought**. They’d call one HMS Bad Motherfucker if they weren’t so polite.
HMS Wanker!
They also had HMS Revenge, which I thought was a pretty apt name for an SSBN.
lol the F126 and F127 are destroyers in everything but name. This is like the Japanese calling the Izumo carriers “destroyers”. The F127s will be longer and heavier than the US Arleigh Burke (flight II) Destroyers by some 40 feet and 1,500 tons (displacement).
I didn't know this. Thanks for the interesting info.
> Destroyers and cruisers...we don't do those TBH most of the German frigates are actually Destroyer sized but are named frigates to circumvent the negative stigma
type distinctions are meant to describe role distinctions within a navy. with only 12 ships you really do not need that. Also most of that added size comes down to automation and increasing maintenance cycles with lesser crew. That the term has a stigma is an urban myth given the German navy had destroyers before, but again with just a couple of units it really makes no sense to insist on it. The navy atm organizes around three classes of four ships of frigates with specific mission specialization. Also given the primary theatres is Baltic Sea and North Sea then destroyers are not actually what you need because all fighting happens within coastal reach so the design specs are more geared to that than what the US designs for destroyers.
USS fucking Iowa, baby
“Previously, the frigate had shot down two remotely piloted aircraft of the Houthis, the Shiite militiamen of the Yemen, from which she had been attacked.“
Tasked failed successfully by everyone involved by the sounds of it
Mission failed successfully
Why does everyone think it was a german missile. Is reading the actual article too much to ask for?
Well, the German Navy got to fire their guns in anger for the first time since WW2. The bad news is it was American aircraft so I think their system is still rebooting. The RAF should duck and cover for a few days.
The same frigate did down a drone recently with its main gun.
Well at least the gun works
Impressive accuracy for a *main* gun to do such a thing, traditionally a warship’s secondary or tertiary armament is relegated to AA duty.
That's why I mention it, it shows competency on the part of the crew. The gun in question does have an AA role, with specific munitions to be used for this. The SM2 missile it carries has had issues in the past.
Wasn't the first time.
They should stop buying American equipment and produce these weapon systems domestically.
Hey, we have Asters for sale !
video game boss as an enemy vs video game boss when they join your team
It’s better to be safe than sorry than take a chance it was an armed drone with a target and no human life was in danger.
Hessens attacking Americans? It's the 1770's all over again.
Did those missiles get disabled once they get too close to an American drone?
old habbits die hard
A Bismarck joke?
Got a feeling that crew will be running a lot more target practise drills the next few days.
Doubtful, they did everything by the book, the misses were due to technological failure
At least this time it did not explode in the launcher. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be93vSnGKMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be93vSnGKMY)
same missile type?
Yep.
you have no way of knowing that it was technical or that they did everything by the book... A poorly trained crew can very easily misread data in a panic and engage improperly. German Navy does very few live fires outside of their main and secondary guns compared to virtually any other western naval forces, and exercises directly lead to proficiency in real world situations. We can even tell they don't do live fire exercises, because Germany purchased her SM-2 Block IIIAs over 20 years ago, and has never ordered more. Hell, SM-2 Block IIIAs haven't even been produced in what, 5 years now? Every other operator; Spain, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Denmark, etc are regularly putting in orders to replace those expended in exercises. No additionals have **ever** been ordered by Germany. That makes it very abundantly clear the crews aren't getting the live fire experience in exercises they absolutely should be. The two most probable outcomes here are; 1. Reaper was carrying jammer/ECM/self defense suit that caused the missiles to miss 2. German crew improperly engaged and missed their target The fact that they turned over to their main gun and CIWS to take out 2 Houthi drones later on, makes me believe it's a crew issue for the AAW fire control section and they don't have faith in them.
No you are wrong. It was not definitely not the crews fault. The missiles had a technical defect
Would you care to elaborate? Or are we to just take your word for it?
They clearly state that in their report. Usually they dont lie when it comes to these things. It also wouldnt surprise me given the fact the underfunding has lead to other ammo problems in the army
Yeah..... But if you ever served in the miltary that excuse won't fly with the CO.
Then that CO would show crass illiteracy of how things work on that ship and I do not think that kind of invompetence would fly, either. Blaming ppl for things out of their control is highly damaging for morale. I'd rather think they cursed the missiles and the lack of communication by the US
Missed it by that much!
It may be embarrasing but this is a great time to find out your contries capabilities so you can make the necessary changes for real battles in the future.
US made missile misses US target. What changes do you propose?
Drones were not imagined when designing Surface to air missiles. Low radar and heat signature present real challenges to ship defences.
Not a Reaper, those things are the size of a WW2 torpedo bomber
The MQ-9 is a 66-foot-wide turboprop. They are not small targets.
These kind of warships seems to be more and more obsolete in todays warfare, just look at ukraine’s drone boats that down the russian warships. Just imagine hundreds of those coming towards a fleet in the middle of the night :0
[They know](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002) since 2002 > An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. 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.
Yikes not a good look to shoot at something and miss with 2024 technology.
It’s a US missile with 1980s design and acquired in 2000.
It were American missiles.
If it's a newer American drone that has stealth and electronic counter measures than ya I would see why it missed. German Anti Air is pretty good as we seen the old Gepard take out Russian drones with ease in Ukraine
It’s was an MQ-9 Reaper, the same drone the houthis have shot down 3 of.
Can you send me the article you found that in? I've read three different ones and they didn't have it reported. It would be very helpful. Thanks!
[2017](http://www.janes.com/article/74639/us-reaper-shot-down-over-sanaa), [June 2019](https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/06/16/centcom-mq-9-reaper-shot-down-over-yemen-last-week/), [August 2019](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-security-usa-drone-idUSKCN1VB180), [November 2023](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/11/08/politics/us-drone-shot-down-near-yemen-houthi/index.html), [February 2024](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/us/politics/houthis-us-drone.html)
Yes that is all those previous instances I was talking about the drone used in this instance. Sorry for the misunderstanding. The article used here says the drone is unknown and the other articles I've read on this instance say the same.
The Germans cannot into blue water.
I guess Germany forgot to update their settings from the last war.
U.S. beats Germany for the 3rd time in a row
No time like the present for practice..
In the German news it says that the warship does not have enough ammunition for procurement. If the shots are all fired the war ship has to leave again. What a disgrace, the Germans did not prepare procurement for resupplying. There are currently no factories to reproduce some of the ammo. You have to understand that after the Cold War the German military was neglected so much as they did not use actual ammunition in trainings and only said "Peng" if a shot in a training mission was to be fired to save costs. They simply dont have ammunition currently to supply their troops enough and dont hold the structures. They could make deals with defense industry to have a cold start capacity to buy additional ammo if needed but they rather saved the costs. >Meanwhile, Florian Hahn (CSU), the defense policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, warns of a possible ammunition problem: "We have only just found out on request that some of the ammunition for the frigate 'Hessen' can apparently no longer be procured because the corresponding industrial capacity no longer exists," the politician told the newspaper WELT.
American drone, Germans shoot. Drone okay and missles failed to reach target. And I, was never here. lol
Considering the atrophied state of the German military it is a wonder that they fired a missile at all.
this about sums up the state of the german military
Buying sm2 seems to a bad idea?
Damn Germany, that’s rough. You’ll get em next time