I naively assumed that radio-controlled drones passing back live video would be easy to locate from their emissions, but electronic warfare complicated, I guess.

There is an infamous tendency in US military system development to take some special purpose project and turn it into some kind of universal platform that can be everything to everyone. The HMMWV and Striker were both like that, so was the Blackhawk, and the same thing was threatening to happen to the Navy as the latest fad in fashionable thinking that contributed to the LCS fiasco.

The thing that helps the Navy push back just a tiny bit more successfully against this lunacy is just the difficulties imposed on them by the various real constraints of operating huge vessels on the stormy high seas and having to bring with them the whole suite of military capabilities necessary to surveil and control vast areas in hard to see environments (for instance, subs underwater), and of course to unleash massive attacks, provide missile defense, or even, theoretically, launch nuclear missiles.

And what the wiser Navy guys say is, “You can’t put it all on one ship, or even one kind of ship. You need specialized ships with division of labor that communicate to share and update an integrated combat operating picture, and work best together as a team. The modular unit size is not one ship. The module is a Strike Group. Sure, some things you can do with one ship for a short time. But at a lot of things you want to do need a group. A single worker bee can be told where to find the flowers, go get the pollen and bring it home. But the true module is the hive.”

I suspect the same “navy logic” will come to be applied to drones, and not just for “swarming” with a lot of identical ones. If the really good IR camera is heavy, expensive, and power hungry, then you need a dedicated spotter drone with long air time to be harder to find and kill while also being able tell the other IR-myopic killer / disposable drones where to attack.