Aircraft Carrier vs. Cruise Missile 4

This is from a 2001 article by the Naval War College Review:

Cruise missiles will replace manned aircraft and sink the ships that carry them. This is both good and bad news for the DD 21 (DDX) crowd. Yes, the advocates of that advanced new destroyer program will probably see the strike role migrate to their platform, because foreign adversaries will have SAM systems that manned aircraft cannot approach (after some “Pearl Harbor” event for manned aircraft). Unfortunately, those adversaries will probably also invest in surface-to-surface missiles as capable as the air variety; those big floating pieces of metal, no matter how high-tech, snazzy, or expensive, will be in dangerous waters.
It is interesting to note that unmanned aircraft, smaller than current surface-to-air missiles, will take over the role of manned aircraft in the same way that aircraft usurped that of the battleship.8 The future for big metal ships is less clear, but it may be along the same lines...The danger here is that carriers and their aircraft constitute a senile weapon system, rapidly approaching obsolescence. Over fifty years ago, U.S. naval aviation was ready with a powerful, and young but eager force, when the “Gun Club”—the battleship admirals—woke up to find their champions in the mud at Pearl Harbor. It is not so with the UCAV world. The gap between the senility of U.S. naval aviation’s force structure and the vitality of unmanned forces is dangerously large. Given the U.S. industrial-age acquisition system, the Navy’s shortsightedness may very well degrade national security.
Missions designed to secure sovereign interests will demand much that manned aircraft are unable to do. Aircraft will need to stay airborne for days on end, going where perhaps manned aircraft cannot, to places where we do not wish to risk human lives. Today naval aviation’s power is largely limited to the single venue of the aircraft carrier, and even that niche is rapidly dwindling as cruise missiles take a bigger chunk of the market. UAVs and UCAVs would enable a new force to gather information from, and act through, many more platforms. Since a force designed to secure global interests must act globally, and since no nation will have the resources to build the number of carriers the new century will require, the answer must be to use something else. Money spent furthering manned aircraft technologies and programs—the CVNX (proposed Nimitz-class carrier replacement) being one of them—is like polishing cannonballs so they will fly a little farther.