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A comment on The U.S. Navy’s Big Mistake: Building Tons of Supercarriers. Parent comment

Re:The U.S. Navy’s Big Mistake: Building Tons of Supercarriers by SEJeff on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @05:04PM (#11905288)
Re: cruise missile targets, not quite for the targetting. A group of the Tomahawk Block IV missiles can be launched over a target area and loiter for some time with a list of pre-programmed targets or updated live from any other sensor platform (a jet, helo, satellite, etc). Say there are 20 targets and 25 missiles live loitering around an area. When the operator says to strike, 15 of the missiles can strike simultaneously while a few can stay aloft to provide BDA (battle damage assessment for non-military folk) and then go in for the 2 of the 1-2 punch.

The Block IV missiles can also share targets amongst eachother and decide which target to strike (among a list of programmed targets) themselves based on factors such as proximity and other classified bits.

http://gizmodo.com/this-tomahawk-is-a-mighty-morphin-cruise-...

https://defense-update.com/products/t/tomahawk.htm

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Re:The U.S. Navy’s Big Mistake: Building Tons of Supercarriers by toss1 on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @08:23PM (#11906433)
Yes, they have these fantastic capabilities, and they are improving all the time.

That said, note that even your example included live updates via comms/satellite links...

Consider the scenario where comms and orbital assets are unavailable/unreliable.

We still need human pilots. We're working to the day when we won't, but, we're not there yet.

(BTW, I'm all for unmanned, and think the F35 is already obsolete, and that humans are the limiting performance factor in esp. fighter aircraft (e.g., limiting it to 10g accelerations, but we're just not there yet for all scenarios, to answer the GP question as to "why not")

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