I saw that distinction too & there's a lot of validity to it. But, I have no doubt a agm-158c could hypothetically go fly off, scout around, come back, and pro

I saw that distinction too & there's a lot of validity to it. But, I have no doubt a agm-158c could hypothetically go fly off, scout around, come back, and probably even have fine motor controls to fly close & get captured by some kind of dock. Grizzly to point this out, but also not all aircrafts in history have been designed to survive engagements. We don't say a Kamikaze suicide bomber isn't an aircraft because it doesnt land. We are however calling Ukraine's Aeroprakt A-22 based drone a drone, even though it's literally an aircraft airframe. But in general that there's a lot of things that could potentially be seen as aircraft carriers, as drones and missiles start to behave closer on the spectrum to aircrafts than to pure missiles. The distinctions of intelligence & sensing seems pretty arbitrary, but it also seems IMHO that the behavior of this lower class of flying system has bent upwards to more resemble it's bigger historically manned/piloted counterpart.