Considering the lower and upper bounds on the death toll this sort of technology will be responsible for ... that is a bit ghoulish.
In fact, one of the worst aspects of this is that it will enable people who think "wow this is cool, just like Starcraft!" to kill hundreds of people without ever even having to confront the amount of damage they are doing.
Totally agreed. I found myself mesmerized watching the short video [1]; wow cool tech, nice views... but there are serious ethical implications for the engineers working on these systems.
Let's not forget that our work as technologists does not exist in a vacuum.
Can you imagine how this would the increase the search radius of a air rescue mission? One search and rescue flight looking for survivors could launch a half dozen drones each extending the explored area by thousands of square kilometres per hour.
This is to replace aircraft carriers as a force projection capability. Truth is, in any shooting war with a near-peer our carriers are extremely vulnerable and there aren’t all that many of them. Lose the carriers and you collapse US military doctrine.
I don't know why we keep building (= paying for) carriers the way that we do. A tanker hull conversion is about as strategically useful and would be a fraction of the cost. Survivability is a moot point when you can swarm a big radar target with hundreds of missiles. Not fancy hypersonic ballistic missiles but just regular old missiles too. When you accept all of that, there's no way you'd commit your CIC and "brains" to the big fat floating target.
No, carriers should be floating airstrips and if a shooting war breaks out with China, they need to leave. And now that you've saved $100 billion a year in operating costs, you can build properly stealthy destroyer class ships, that can launch and recover smaller CAP drones, to do all the real work for a fraction of the operating costs.
Because carriers are a massive engineering project whose benefits to the economy can be spread between a number of states and congressional districts allowing them to get funding approval. Smaller ships would require much less. A carrier group is basically a floating military base that generates a lot of economic activity. The US military is first and foremost a welfare program for our weapons manufacturers; it’s why we spent the last 20 years throwing teenagers into a meat grinder with no real mission objectives other than to destroy a lot of equipment so it could be replaced.
I agree with you that carriers are a relic of the 20th century. Manned aircraft probably are too, which negates the need for carriers (which I expect we will see in the next major air war).
In fact, one of the worst aspects of this is that it will enable people who think "wow this is cool, just like Starcraft!" to kill hundreds of people without ever even having to confront the amount of damage they are doing.