Carriers have been in question long before this conflict. There's been a big question as to how effective and/or survivable a carrier battle group will be in the South Pacific, especially given China's long range anti-ship missiles.

There's been a whole ramp up of very exquisite technology to try to get the upper hand here, but I don't expect we'll see the carrier be the force it has been over the last few generations. It's just too tempting a target.

I get the feeling you haven't read the article. The carrier is not in drone range precisely for that reason.

The reason so many tankers have been lost and that E3 sentry is that the carriers are having to stay out of the preferred range and rely on refueling for the bombing campaign.

If the CSG could move to the Iranian coast they wouldn't have to maintain a constant chain of refueling tankers which have become so vulnerable.

Cheap drones are pretty useless against large naval vessels. Making a dent in those ships requires a heavy, specialized penetrating warheads. And even then you'll need to score several hits.

Just the warhead alone on a standard anti-ship weapon weighs more than an entire Shahed-136 drone.

Carriers aren’t going away because there’s nothing else that does what they do.

Many nations can blow stuff up but to actually project power, you need a mobile air base.

> ... drones

Regarding drones they are, by definition, not very sturdy: for they're drones and not B52 bombers or bunkers.

What's very likely going to happen is that, just I can take a Browning B525 Sporter balltrap shotgun and shoot any civilian drone from afar because the gun shoots an expanding cloud of tiny, cheap, pellets, armies are now going to come up with systems to both defend and destroy drones.

I'm not saying the drones used in war are the same as DJI drones: what I'm saying is that with the proper tech, they're much less expensive to take down than, say, a ballistic missile or an aircraft carrier.

Anyone seeing this conflict and thinking that the militaro-industrial complex isn't hard at work working on solutions to take down drones is smoking heavy stuff.

Ukrainian and Russian did it already (although it's nothing serious, it's just an example): here we were talking about actual tiny drones, carrying explosives, and running towards vehicles. As a cheap defense measures, they started immediately adding metallic "spikes" (not unlike hairs) to the vehicles, so that the drone wouldn't reach the vehicle's body and instead explode when hitting the mettalic spikes.

War has always been about "tech x" / "anti tech x". This time is not going to be different.

> Though I do worry about the possibility of a more sophisticated opponent being able to launch swarms of drones and missiles at aircraft carriers.

China. They're demos of thousands of drones fully synchronized in the sky at night making nice 3D patterns with everybody on the ground going "aaaah" and "wooooow" is a display of military capability.

I'm not saying it's not a concern: but it's not as if the US (and others) were going to sit and think "oh drones exists, the concept of war is over".

It sounds like you agree vehemently with the article, modulo the reframe of what the military had to already as solely your personal worry, about a hypothetical, that could only occur with a more sophisticated opponent, in the future.