Rods from God are only simple at a high level, but as always the devil is in the details. 1. You have to position the rod satellite in the right orbit, or have

Rods from God are only simple at a high level, but as always the devil is in the details. 1. You have to position the rod satellite in the right orbit, or have enough so one is generally over the target. 2. Then when the order comes in to kill the carrier, your 1-ton rod plus satellite has to de-orbit from ~8km/s. Basically it needs the rocket that launched it, but up in orbit to drop it back down. (It's not quite so bad because gravity is assisting rather than fighting as during launch, but it's still a decent de-orbit vehicle.) The de-orbit takes time, and either you're dropping from ~1000km up or re-entering at some kind of ballistic arc from ~200km up. 3. Obviously the carrier will be maneuvering the moment that massive de-orbit burn is detected. So when course corrections will be necessary throughout the re-entry and maybe even into terminal flight, when your rod is hypersonic in the thickest part of the atmosphere, sheathed in sensor-blinding, comms-blackouting plasma. (I'm assuming a CIWS—point defense gatling—throwing up a cloud of metal wouldn't do much to the rod, nor would an IR missile be able to hit the rod, but maybe those things could alter its trajectory enough to cause a miss.) 4. Then if you actually hit the target, did you over-penetrate it, smashing a 1m hole clean through the hull into the water, or did the rod explode like a bomb against the hull? (I assume the former but am very unsure here.) If it's just an unstoppable but small hole, damage repair teams would patch it and seal off those compartments to keep the ship fighting. So in the end, you have a very expensive (let's use your $260M), unmaintainable hypersonic slug that everyone can see launch (and who launched it) and it might be able to poke some holes in a carrier. Or you use normal hypersonic missiles, which should be harder to detect launching, more maneuverable, and might deliver explosive or nuclear payloads. Or you launch a swarm of hundreds of relatively cheap anti-ship missiles and just overwhelm the carrier defenses that way. So I agree the dominance of the carrier will last only as long as the next great powers war (and also that guided missile submarines might well be the future) but it's from fear of God raining down tungsten wrath.