Seems like a downgrade, doesn't make sense to me. A drone still needs an equivalent support ship if it's a similar enough size needed for the weight of bombs and guns. If anything I'd see the carriers getting a lot more advanced if they're spending more and more time further from port, and that meaning more nuclear power not huge fuel tanks which would likely be areas you wouldn't want to have as a target.
Yeah, but you could have a smaller ship for the drones, or even an automated ship, and you could put a TON of those floating in international waters around the world instead of just a few big carriers with tons of people onboard. And it makes sense, from an affected personnel perspective - the strikes can get even more "surgical" with the ever-decreasing size & increasing speed & functionality of the drones, in terms of reducing the risk to soldiers & reducing non-targeted casualties. Nobody wants to start a nuclear war, because everyone knows that the whole world would turn to ash because everyone would nuke each other, which is why groups like ISIS are fighting in the style they do, which is where drone technology becomes more applicable. Stuff like swarm tech is getting pretty crazy:
And they're working on making drones even more suitable for helping individual soldiers. This video shows off a cool mini-helicopter that can evac a wounded person:
It can do precision supply drops within 3 meters & fits in a cargo van:
http://www.dragonflypictures.com/products/unmanned-vehicles/dp-14-hawk/
War is always war & will always be awful, but the game keeps changing thanks to technology. Everything is logged in a database somewhere these days. The amount of data available is staggering. We know the names of virtually every American soldier killed in the Iraq & Afghanistan wars:
https://qz.com/411623/the-names-of-the-6828-americans-who-have-died-in-afghanistan-and-iraq/
And speaking statistically, those numbers have decreased dramatically from wars past. Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) killed 2,351 Americans, Iraqi Freedom killed 4,412 Americans, and New Dawn killed 66 Americans. For comparison, the Korean war claimed 30k+ American lives and the Vietnam war claimed 50k+ American lives. Granted, those were on a vastly different scale than "modern" wars, but the idea of using technology to help to reduce unwanted casualties on both sides is a good thing. I'd hate to see things turn into "1984" (just look at Britain's insane Big Brother camera system), but drone technology keeps improving & seems to be helping in reducing who dies (on both sides). I've lost a number of friends to wars in the last 15-20 years...I wonder how many of them would be alive today if they could have sent out drones in their places.
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