It seems to me, this highlights the fatal flaw of our deepwater navy, mainly huge aircraft carriers a really fucking slow, and represent the highest expression of the previous century's military paradigm, mainly force projection across vast oceans.
The "really fucking slow" aircraft carrier is actually the fastest ship in the deep water navy, with an unclassified speed of 35+ knots. One of it's defense strategies is to simply outrun any known threat because nothing else can match it.
At the beginning of ww2 Japan based its entire naval strategy on the idea that the navy with the most powerful destroyers would triumph. It was a mistake that cost them the war.
They focused on carriers, and we beat them at that due in large part to the way both nations trained and managed pilots. Japan lost all of their seasoned pilots with only a bunch of poorly trained conscripts to take up those jobs. This is right when they started using kamikaze attacks.
Sure, they made some huge fucking destroyers and battleships, but that was far from their focus.
we live in the age of relatively cheap hypersonic cruise missiles, autonomous weapon systems, and nuclear submarines, and our reliance on the carrier battle group as the backbone of our ability to project force abroad, seems more and more to be following the Japanese mistake when they built the Yamato and Musashi, ignoring the current paradigm they were living in.
That current paradigm is that US carriers are often the first on scene to any major world event, to either fuck shit up or provide aid and support. Sure, you can send some Air Force aircraft halfway around the world and back, but that doesn't provide for a localized base of operations and a stressed logistics chain. So what do we do? We send a carrier there, it holds shit down until that logistics chain can get figured out and set up, and then works in tandem or backup for the other services.
This tactic works extremely well. And as far as cruise missiles? There are defenses for those. The ability to put a carrier with more air power than most other countries combined is a big target, but it's also a huge, moving strategic powerhouse. The reason so many countries are trying to develop counters to the Carrier group is because of it's dominance, and the fact that most absolutely fail at it is only proof to the sheer strength of it.
As far as the "kills" from the sub this article talks about, torpedoes don't work well against large ships. Let's take the Yamamoto as an exaple to prove this - it took 9 bombs and 13 torpedoes to sink that bastard. We also like to play nice with our allies, and often train with heavy restrictions on our side, so take the article with a grain of salt.