The Houthis have sunk 2 civilian ships, out of 30 damaged.
It's hard to sink a ship.
It's even harder to sink a military ship in prepared condition with a crew trained in damage control.
The USS Cole was reportedly hit with 1,000 lbs of C4 against the hull [0], while presumably not at battle stations, yet still managed to stay afloat.
Watch some of the sinkex's for what it takes to send a ship to the bottom (read: heavyweight torpedo). There's a reason they usually burn before they sink.
You could launch a thousand of them for the cost of a single anti ship missile.
A reasonable thing to do in a modern war would be to launch 10,000 drones all at once at an aircraft carrier, even at a very low success rate that's a lot of little holes.
Just ask yourself how many you're going to need and what defense exists for them currently.
Shitty self-guided weapons can be made very easily these days and in tremendously large numbers. The defense industry focus is presently on very advanced things that it seems could trivially be overwhelmed by volume.
When something floats, there are fewer restrictions on weight. CV-66 took a lot of direct explosions before going to the bottom.
The easiest way to think of modern carriers is ships inside ships, such that the entire thing stays buoyant even if most of the outside compartments are compromised.
Navies have been building steel ships for a minute... and are pretty good at it.
To get holes at the water line, you’re going to have to take your drone down to the water line. Which means you’re going to have to deal with the waves and spray from being down there. Cheap drones are not notable for dealing well with hitting the water.
Beyond the thick steel plating, and compartmentalization, there’s also the fact that little holes just won’t let in much water. If you want to sink a ship, you need to let in more water than the pumps can take out.
If you start talking about $50k drones, then a bunch of these objections start changing. You can get much more range, much more speed, much larger warheads, and much greater capabilities in general. But your cost curve has changed a bunch, so you get 200 drones instead of 10k drones for a given amount of cash.
Surface ships are still the only way to transport large quantities of troops and equipment over long distances. If you want to maintain the ability to project force beyond oceans, you need a navy to escort the vulnerable transport ships and to fight whatever threats they would be facing.
Of course whether they can survive a determined attack from a near-peer adversary remains to be seen.
Typically, they have to send a specialized demolition team to actually sink the ship after the exercise is over.
To a first approximation, US Navy ships are demonstrably unsinkable. That has always been a hallmark of US Naval architecture, and they are rightly proud of it. The idea that it is possible to destroy these ships with tens of kilos of explosives delivered by cheap drones isn’t serious.