Future warships may all become motherships

Will navies develop dedicated mothership tenders for swarms of optionally crewed surface vessels?

The function will probably spread across the fleet, with many or all ships supporting, controlling, and sustaining uncrewed systems rather than leaving the task to one specialist tender.

Uncrewed craft will need command links, maintenance, recovery, fuel, weapons, and data support. Concentrating every function in one tender can create a vulnerable bottleneck and limit where the systems operate. Ordinary warships may instead carry and support their own mix of smaller crewed, optionally crewed, and uncrewed assets. The result is a distributed fleet in which mothership capability becomes part of general warship design.