Obviously the issue isn't that simple. Numbers re important. Nevertheless, cheap airplanes are going to have less performance than expensive ones. How much difference does that make?
I wrote a paper, presented at a conference of the OPERATIONS RESEARCH SOCIETY OF AMERICA, that showed that if the performance differential between the low-performance and high-performance aircraft was big enough, the cheap airplanes were simply cheap targets. The Air Force that counted on numbers instead of performance would we wiped out with little damage to the opponent. My paper was runner-up for an award. Runner-up only because I intentionally didn't address research & development costs, but only production costs. Still, it indicated the judges found my paper to be of high quality.
The same analysis applies to naval vessels. If their performance is reduced sufficiently to make a big cost reduction, they're simply going to be sitting ducks on the ocean.
The trick is to find the right tradeoff between performance and affordability. Maybe our carriers are "too big to fail." If so, we need to decide whether several smaller carriers in a carrier task group would provide equivalent performance to one big carrier at lower cost.
The important thing to remember, though, is that both numbers and performance matter. As someone has said, the most expensive thing you can have is a second-best Air Force. The same applies to a second-best Navy.
With drones, we can have cheap airplanes and expensive pilots that don’t have to spend months in some prison camp if they survive at all when the plane gets shot down.
I would like our few F-35’s to be preceded into the battle space by hundreds of lightweight unmanned “cheap” fighters to overwhelm the enemy.
>>No one ever asked where we were going to get the cheap pilots to fly those cheap airplanes.
That was then. This is now. Those cheap pilots are sitting in front of X-Boxes with years of experience steering an avatar through intense combat scenarios and processing lots of visual and audial input and making snap decisions.
The “gunfighter” planes need pilots inside, but the missile and bomb throwers can be flown remotely. We still need some heavy air superiority fighters with real pilots for those situations where the enemy air force actually comes up to challenge us. But for the assymetrical warfare of the war against radical islam, drones are doing the job very well.
The Air Force insists on using rated pilots to fly drones, which is silly since a team of enlisted men could fly a squadron of them with a commissioned officer overseeing them and making “official” decisions. You can reduce the number of expensive pilots needed greatly and still deliver the ordnance.