In the Falklands War in 1982 the British lost the HSM Sheffield destroyer to an Exocet missile fired from an airplane 20 to 30 miles away. The missile’s warhead didn’t even explode but the destroyer eventually sank.
This was about 23 years ago. Since then much development in missile technology has occurred. A modern destroyer costs well over 10 billion dollars to build while a modern cruise missile costs about 500 thousand dollars. Unless my math is wrong, that means a country could build around twenty thousand cruise missiles for the cost of one destroyer. Today, missiles can be launched from land, aircraft, small ships, submarines, underwater platform, and even relatively small fishing boats. For the cost of one destroyer and enemy could fire twenty missiles at each of the twenty-or-so escort ships shown in the photograph above and still have over ten thousands missiles to sink the carrier. Time changes things.
And they will be committing national suicide in the process. How much does that cost them?