The torpedo was a game-changer. As was the submarine. And the airplane. Antiship missiles have been around since the German Fritz-X of 1943. Heck, they even sank a proper battleship with one.
There will always be game-changers and the game will be changed so that the game will no longer be susceptible to that particular game-changer. Its all a cycle of countermeasure vs countermeasure.
I agree. Wish I had confidence our guys can fight off these new supersonic ship killers.
Not always. Battleships disappeared totally, their armor could not protect against air attack.
Then we swung toward lighter, faster warships. But the weapons against them have improved by orders of magnitude.
Our best DDs, due to PC wrecking our crews and training, can’t avoid slow tankers moving at 12 knots. (Our admirals stood by while PC did this damage. They did nothing to stop it. Nobody resigned in protest.)
By what modern miracle do you expect our 30-knot unarmored warships to survive salvos of hypersonic ship-killers?
Have you heard of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse? Our “military geniuses” assured us that AA defenses would keep any air threads far away. How did that work out? Do you know why we stopped building dreadnoughts after that?