[0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1
[1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-wa...
Also the capabilities of commercial and government geospatial systems has only continued to improve in the ~decade since the article was written.
Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drones, flying lower than cloud cover, that are programmed to look for carriers over a wide area, confirm their shape optically, paint them for missiles, and take the disconnection/destruction of any one of them as an indication of possible activity and automated retasking? It's a scary world to be a slow-moving vehicle, these days.
And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector as well.
Taking out a billion dollar asset with a couple million dollars worth of drones and a few (more expensive) anti ship missles? Priceless.
You're off by at least an order of magnitude. The camera mount you'd have to put on such a drone would cost about that much, probably more.
You're also vastly underestimating just how big the ocean actually is.
And finding the aircraft carrier is not the penultimate step to destroying it (a "few" anti shipping missiles aren't getting through those defenses).
High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellites Are Ready for Launch (2023)
Editor's note: [ ... ] Airbus contacted Proceedings to note that the 2016 pricing estimates were correct at the time but that the company will be releasing new, lower estimates soon.
Zephyr – down but definitely not out (2022)
After an astounding 64 days aloft and a travelling a total more than 30,000nm, a British-built solar-powered UAV crashed just hours before it was due to break the ultimate world endurance record.
The aircraft was the British-built solar-powered Airbus Zephyr UAV – one of a new breed of HAPS (high altitude, pseudo-satellites) – a new category of UAVs that are aiming for zero-emission, ultra-long- endurance flight as a kind of terrestrial satellite – able to loiter in the stratosphere for weeks or months at a time to monitor borders, watch shipping, relay communications or conduct atmospheric science.
Aside from the hostile drone command and launch being found and destroyed, the drone itself would either be shot down by a missile or disabled by a direct energy weapon.
If the drone were to fault on it's own and was designed to float, it will be expensive to retreive it. Cheaper at scale to launch the sensors into orbit or deploy bouys.
Hundreds of cheap drones would have negligible impact on a modern warship's integrity. An aircraft carrier is designed to have an actual airplane crash into it and continue operating. These boats still have armor. It's not purely an information war.