So, in your described scenario, drones are functionally no different than a missile barrage, except slower, cheaper and maybe easier to deploy. So:
- Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind of threats, like CIWS.
- Carriers don't exists in a vacuum, there are a lot of other systems in a modern carrier group.
- Just like launching a missile barrage, deploying the tens/hundreds of thousands of drones is going to be quite the logistical achievement, especially bringing it in range of a modern carrier group, designed to project force against threats hundreds of kilometers away.
- Drones have significant range/projection issues. The Bayraktar, at $2M a piece, has ~300km of range and can only bear a very small payload designed to engage armored ground targets, nothing that would threaten carriers or destroyers, even deployed en masse.
- The bigger the range, the bigger the payload, the bigger the size/costs. The effectiveness of your drone swarm is always limited by this equation. Millions of small aliexpress drones bearing the equivalent of a hand grenade are not going to do anything against a carrier provided it can be deployed at all. You would need to be <10km away due to their range limitation and at this stage, there are already fighter jets and destroyers sitting on top of you.
- No single munition under the kiloton order of magnitude will sink an aircraft carrier. For a drone or anything under the scale of cruise missiles/MOAB, this means nuclear. Hand-grenade sized nuclear explosives in drone swarms? I wish! But to quote the fantastic game Highfleet, once you get the genie out, you cannot put it back in the bottle. If you plan to bring nuclear weapons to a war, everybody already has ICBMs.
tl;dr: Drones swarms don't disrupt the current status quo: Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single engagement. The usefullness of drone swarms is not against modern carrier groups but small-scale asymmetrical engagements, such as the guerilla operations currently carried in Ukraine or in Syria, in which small drones are incredibly effective weapons. This is still a big deal, as it is the most likely form of conflict we're going to see in the rest of this century, not full-on peer-to-peer conflicts between superpowers.
- Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind of threats, like CIWS.
- Carriers don't exists in a vacuum, there are a lot of other systems in a modern carrier group.
- Just like launching a missile barrage, deploying the tens/hundreds of thousands of drones is going to be quite the logistical achievement, especially bringing it in range of a modern carrier group, designed to project force against threats hundreds of kilometers away.
- Drones have significant range/projection issues. The Bayraktar, at $2M a piece, has ~300km of range and can only bear a very small payload designed to engage armored ground targets, nothing that would threaten carriers or destroyers, even deployed en masse.
- The bigger the range, the bigger the payload, the bigger the size/costs. The effectiveness of your drone swarm is always limited by this equation. Millions of small aliexpress drones bearing the equivalent of a hand grenade are not going to do anything against a carrier provided it can be deployed at all. You would need to be <10km away due to their range limitation and at this stage, there are already fighter jets and destroyers sitting on top of you.
- No single munition under the kiloton order of magnitude will sink an aircraft carrier. For a drone or anything under the scale of cruise missiles/MOAB, this means nuclear. Hand-grenade sized nuclear explosives in drone swarms? I wish! But to quote the fantastic game Highfleet, once you get the genie out, you cannot put it back in the bottle. If you plan to bring nuclear weapons to a war, everybody already has ICBMs.
tl;dr: Drones swarms don't disrupt the current status quo: Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single engagement. The usefullness of drone swarms is not against modern carrier groups but small-scale asymmetrical engagements, such as the guerilla operations currently carried in Ukraine or in Syria, in which small drones are incredibly effective weapons. This is still a big deal, as it is the most likely form of conflict we're going to see in the rest of this century, not full-on peer-to-peer conflicts between superpowers.