> (intelligent cruise missiles that communicate with each other to maximize the chance that at least one hits the target)
The Moskva was designed to launch exactly that system. The P-500 Bazalt/P-1000 Vulkan missiles that are launched from the huge battery of launchers that dominate the deck of the Moskva class coordinate among themselves in flight to minimize the attack profile and prioritize targets. The thing you're thinking of is already old hat.
Hypersonic weapons seek to deliver equivalent power in a far smaller, lower cost and more agile platform.
But you can always decrease the costs of such systems, improve their mass-production, and maximize their smarts.
The "Gray Wolf" cruise missile system that USAF is investing into (or maybe more accurately: experimenting with) is one such "cruise missile swarm" that's quite modern, for example, and is competing against Hypersonic missiles for development. The Gray Wolves seem like they're small enough to be deployed on common fighter-aircraft, like F16 or F35.
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Lets say you only need 8 Gray Wolves to reliably hit and kill an enemy cruiser. That's only 2x F35 fighters that need to be deployed to launch those 8x Gray Wolves.
It might be easier logistically speaking, to launch 2x or 3x F35B or F35C fighters off a US Navy Carrier / US Marine Assault Ship to launch 8x missiles, rather than figuring out how to launch a larger bomber who can carry the larger Hypersonic missile.
No one really knows how the next war is going to face. Even though we're getting more information in this Ukrainian/Russian conflict, we're not really seeing major naval battles (Ukraine after all, doesn't have a Navy). Therefore, we don't really have much insight at all to how carriers / destroyers / frigate missile platforms vs airplane systems work.
> Hypersonic weapons seek to deliver equivalent power in a far smaller, lower cost and more agile platform.
But the Hypersonic missiles themselves need to be much larger and full of propellant to break not only the sound-barrier, but the hypersonic barrier. That's a lot of drag to breakthrough.
Can those systems be shrunk to a small enough size to fit onto an F35 or F16? If you can only "shrink" those missiles to B52 size, that limits their deployment. Its not like you can launch a B52 from a carrier. And even if you could, B52 doesn't have any stealth capabilities like the F35, so you wouldn't want to use it in anything resembling a contested airspace.
Subsonic weapons are naturally going to be smaller than hypersonic weapons. Subsonic weapons always have exponentially less drag, since they're flying at far slower speeds. Less drag means more range with less propellant, and smaller weapons yet yielding more payload (bigger explosives, since you're spending less precious "weight" on propellant).
EDIT: Case in point, the USA's HAWC project has no explosives at all, and is purely a kinetic-energy projectile.
The Moskva was designed to launch exactly that system. The P-500 Bazalt/P-1000 Vulkan missiles that are launched from the huge battery of launchers that dominate the deck of the Moskva class coordinate among themselves in flight to minimize the attack profile and prioritize targets. The thing you're thinking of is already old hat.
Hypersonic weapons seek to deliver equivalent power in a far smaller, lower cost and more agile platform.