Interesting observation – there is some evidence of this even in the “two wars” strategy that held sway for many years post WWII.
As for ACs becoming obsolete – I think that argument can be made about having a Navy in the age of drones and cruise missiles. It’s more about perception (being seen) rather than combat efficacy. Diplomacy changes when there’s a AC sitting on your front porch.
Yes, now you have a target to send your drones after.
The thing is, to date no-one has ever used a drone against anything more advanced than a pickup truck. We have no idea how effective they are against actual modern technology. They might be game changers; they might get shredded instantly by a carrier group’s anti-aircraft and CAP. We just don’t know.
Sure we know. The US Navy effectively “mission killed” a cruiser using a drone and it wasn’t even trying. One of our own cruisers as it happened, but it happened!
But the cruiser “wasn’t even trying” either:
Any ship can be sunk if her crew just sits there and does nothing.
Generalize that to “any ship can be sunk if it’s crew isn’t expecting to have to defend the ship that day” and you essentially have the situation probably every (or nearly every, just for a little wiggle room) ship in the Navy is in… today. Which gets us back to the question of whether or not a CVN conducting what are considered, at least by those aboard, to be “routine” deterrence operations off another country’s coast or in a restricted waterway is worth it given the vulnerability.
For a roughly equivalent scenario, consider the attack on USS Cole twenty years ago. You can have all the gun mounts manned you want, but if you aren’t expecting to shoot something (much less know which “something” to start shooting at amidst all the others that don’t mean to come alongside and explode), what you’re really “expecting” is to take the first hit.
A naval fleet is great for projecting power when dealing with non-peer nations. But the prospect of peer and near-peer conflicts raise the question of how does a ship defend against maneuvering cruise missiles coming in at wave height and hypersonic weapons, also with some maneuverability. The Navy is reduced to “projecting power” against, say, China from somewhere close to Australia. Drastic changes are going to be necessary, which doesn’t mean aircraft carriers and big battleships are going to go away, but they can’t be the tip of the spear of projected power.
“Our fleet is too small, and our capabilities are stacked on too few ships that are too big,” he said. “And that needs to change over time. [But] we have made significant investments in aircraft carriers and we’re going to have those for a long time…"
While some of their super weapons were harebrained I very much disagree with them be lousy at fielding suitable military forces. At the start of WWII the Me BF109 was the greatest fighter ever built and the Panzer III was a very capable tank; perhaps only outclassed by the Brit’s Matilda. Both were produced in great numbers. The Flak 88 anticraft gun was so overpowered it was converted (with great success) for use as an antitank gun. Germany clearly had some very capable units deployed in large numbers.
But taking over the world is very hard. Germany made some major strategic mistakes but ultimately it was the Allies securing the middle east which won the war. This key victory left Germany forces starved for fuel the rest of the war.
So hard that one might almost consider such a plan to be moronic. As in, they were strategically bankrupt. Really good at bulldozing countries that desperately wanted peace and were generally opposed to blowing apart large chunks of Europe for the second time in a generation. Not so good at going up against alerted and determined opposition.
Do not give the Nazis too much credit for anything, even the things they are supposed to have done well (but not well enough, it seems), but especially do not forget how morally bankrupt and all around foolish their supporting ideology was.
Wow, I.'d forgotten why I stopped getting into Great Debates. But here we are, so far off topic and no one giving a shit. Nothing about battleships in WW1 or WW2 going on here for sometime now.
Now it’s time for someone to post that I don’t know how to debate and the debate has moved past your understanding. 
Not the same kind of drone people talk about these days… what they were using was a BQM-74E target drone, which is basically a remote-controlled anti-ship missile that they can use to simulate the real thing- aircraft or missile for training and testing purposes.
The Navy has used these things since the 1950s. They even go so far as to rig up retired military aircraft as drones to better simulate aerial attacks. In a lot of ways, the only differences between the target drones and either manned aircraft or autonomous anti ship missiles is the presence of warheads and the fact that they’re controlled remotely instead of by a pilot or guidance system.
The only advantage a drone might have is that they’re typically small-ish compared to manned aircraft, but with that smaller size, comes a smaller payload. And you have control links to maintain, and they can be vulnerable to electronic warfare. So there’s no free lunch- drones aren’t some sort of wonder weapon that there are no counters against, they’re just something that smaller/poorer nations might be able to field with a better chance of success than manned aircraft.
Nitpick: None of those is an atoll.
Just using the terminology my dad used, but yes Okinawa an Guadalcanal actually pretty big.
But I guess my point is that battleships were extensively used in WW2 and it surprises me that anyone would even think they were not. When I hear things like a lot of smaller ships could have done the same job I just shake my head. A destroyer only had maybe 5 inch guns and had to get close to shore due to limited range. Battle ships had 16 inch guns and could stand 20 mile offshore and pound their targets. When 5" shells hit the beach you dig in, when 16 inch shells hit the beach you get off the beach. The constant barrage of battleship fire power and the scale of destruction and fear it caused seems to be lost on this generation.
Watch the history channel young dudes and prepare for the WW2 quiz that my generation has been preparing for since we were little! 
They make great tourist destinations now. I dont think going to see a ww2 era destroyer would be as interesting.
Is this a bad thing?
I get it. Really, I do. This was more of a dud cruise missile than what you typically think of as a drone. The point is this: there was a claim, no doubt and exaggeration for effect, but still very much in support of furthering a claim with some perceived truth to it, that drones aren’t good for anything but low end targets. Like pickup trucks.
What I think some people here may not fully grasp is that modern warships can be very fragile, for lack of a better word, and far less capable of absorbing blows than even their similarly unarmored (in terms of destroyers and light cruisers) WWII-era counterparts. Particularly when it comes to their advanced electronics and combat systems. Several Arleigh Burke class destroyers have taken major damage (both due to enemy action and negligence) and succeeded in staying afloat, but in all cases they immediately, and for a year or more, became little more than hulks.
A properly placed round from an RPG could mission kill just about any ship in the US Navy. I also think, as your post continues, you underestimated the size and developing capabilities of modern UAVs. It’s entirely possible, given that CVNs are built to last fifty years, you will see manned carrier aircraft being retired before the carriers themselves.
That’s not what I said, exactly. I said that drones (by which I mean remote-controlled aircraft that fire other weapons, not remote-controlled missiles that are designed to explode on impact) haven’t yet been used in actual combat against anything more advanced than a pickup truck, which is more or less true. We’ve never seen what happens if, say, a Predator drone encounters a MiG-29 or an S-300. In terms of peer warfare, they’re still an unproven weapon system.
Cruise missiles, of course, are highly effective weapons that have been used against basically everything. But cruise missiles aren’t drones.
You have missed my point completely. Which is that drones, not cruise missiles, but drones, successors to the things that we have grown accustomed to seeing drop munitions on pickup trucks, are reaching a point where they may rival manned aircraft in terms of combat capability, and that such manned aircraft may become obsolete within the next few decades, if not sooner.
Perhaps part of the reason you have only seen drones employed in blowing up pick up trucks is not because that’s still the limit of what drones can do, but precisely because the US hasn’t been engaged in a conflict with a peer or near peer and that the employment of drones under those circumstances, and the drones themselves, would begin to look very different.
I’ll believe that when I see it.
Drones will definitely supplement manned aircraft, but replace them? I don’t see it happening. Especially when enemies really start to exploit their unique vulnerabilities.
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The term “drone” is part of the problem. Which is why the DoD doesn’t use it. That word means everything from toys with cameras but painted olive drab to an AI-flown jet. And it also implies something very dumb, or at least slavishly lacking in initiative. Which are increasingly inapt implications.
Using the word “drone” almost guarantees the people talking will miscommunicate.
The current DoD term of art is “Unmanned Air Vehicle” = “UAV”. The point being that the only real qualification is the unmanned part; beyond that it could be anything we can figure out how to build.
As to what happens when a Predator meets a Mig-29 or an S-300, we know exactly what happens: 99 times out of 100 the Predator is promptly blown out of the sky.
A SAM radar, a fighter radar, and ordinary ground-based area surveillance = GCI radars, can readily detect a Predator. As an aircraft it’s essentially the same size, RCS, and performance as a turboprop powered regional airliner like these: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbm=isch&source=hp&q=regional+turboprop . Further, given that the remote operator can’t possibly know (s)he’s being targeted, it won’t even try to maneuver to defend itself. It’d be shooting fish laid out on ice, not even fish in a barrel. Shame I’m too old to get in on the fun anymore.
UAV tech now is proceeding in several directions at once. Here are 4 completely unclassified, well publicized examples off the top of my head.
One is fairly small (3’ wingspan) kamikaze like cruise missile with a range of <50 miles that is launched in a salvo of dozens of units to “swarm” together and arrive at the target simultaneously from umpteen directions to collectively overwhelm the close-in defenses. Given the fragility of modern warships (and SAM sites, and some other high value targets), the swarm has a very high PK despite each individual weapon having a lowish PK.
DARPA and the contractors are flying these things today and refining the AI swarming software. They are NOT yet a deployed weapons system.
Once they get that working against slow-moving targets like ships the next step will be to deploy it against aircraft.
Right now DARPA has been flying swarming dogfighting software installed on toy-sized quadcopters. They’ve “fought” hundreds of battles of up to 20 against 20 and it’s the damnedest thing to watch as they all behave sort of like wheeling flocks of birds attacking each other. But at about 10x speed versus swarming starlings.
Good luck dogfighting all 20 of them at once. Hint Mr. hotshot future fighter pilot: you’re gonna lose.
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Here’s another: in Australia today Boeing is actively building a machine they call a “Loyal Wingman” or “LW”. It’s an AI-flown semi-stealthy fighter about the size of an F-5 with no cockpit or life support systems, but with modern sensors & weapons. One or several of these would be used alongside a single manned aircraft e.g. an F-18. This is not a research project or a pie in the sky boondoggle prototype. This is deployable hardware that will be part of the front-line RAAF within a few years tops.
The LW is not somehow flown remotely from the ground. It decides for itself how to help the manned fighter. The manned fighter designates air or ground target(s) and all the vehicles, including the manned one, attack in a coordinated fashion. After designation, all the coordination is computer-to-computer; the human just flies his jet as if he was alone in the sky. It’s intended to work the same way a formation of 2 or 4 manned fighters works today. Just using 1 or 3 less crewmen.
The LWs are about 10% the cost of an equivalent manned fighter, so they’re more expendable. And don’t need to fly practice sorties either. So the lifecycle cost of one unit is a tiny fraction of a manned equivalent fighter. It gets built, delivered, then sits in its box until the war starts. In that sense LWs have purchase vs operating cost metrics like a munition, not like a weapons platform.
Finally: for the last 5 years the USMC has been running an experiment in Afghanistan with unpiloted full-sized multi-ton helicopters delivering supplies to remote firebases and teams on foot. They have flown thousands of sorties and millions of pounds of beans, bullets, and (this being the 21st century) batteries.
Again this thing is not a quad copter toy; it’s a real manned helo just without the man in it (Kaman K-MAX - Wikipedia). It is not remotely piloted. Somebody somewhere uses a tablet to instruct the helo to “Fly to these coordinates, pick up the waiting load, fly to those coordinates, find a safe place to land nearby, set the load down then fly to these coordinates …”. Click [OK] and the darn thing does the job totally on its own regardless of weather, darkness, obstacles at the proposed LZ, etc.
This future is now, or almost now. And it will revolutionize warfare about as thoroughly as the advent of firearms did in Europe sometime around the 14th Century.