It is already a thing. Cruise missiles are basically pilotless airplanes. They have wings, they have air breathing engines, they navigate and manoeuvre like an airplane (bank to turn most of them for example).
Cruise missile carrying submarines are a staple of the US strategy. Every significant engagement starts by such a submarine rolling in and unleashing the cruise missiles to suppress the enemy air defences. And again the cruise missiles are pilotless aircraft in everything but name.
Cruise missiles do not return to base. Also I don't know of any cruise missile that is used for reconnaissance but I may be uninformed. Are any cruise missiles launched and then flown around until you notice something of interest to sink?
Problem with using a cruise missile for recon is that it looks exactly like a missile.
> Are any cruise missiles launched and then flown around until you notice something of interest to sink?
Sort of, there are loitering munitions which essentially hang out until they find a target and then engage it. The IAI Harpy from the late 80s is a pretty good example. It's an anti-radiation missile, meaning it locks on to enemy radar signals and uses that to home in and destroy them, degrading enemy air defenses. Usually an aircraft would have to detect an enemy radar signal and then fire the missile. With the Harpy, you simply fire it and it hangs around, potentially for 2 hours, waiting until it detects an radar signal, at which point it engages.
The tomahawk missile in theory could be capable of loitering behavior. It already has a 2-way datalink, allowing it to send information back to a controller and the controller to send commands to the missile. It even has a camera and can transmit images back to the controller, which I believe is used for bomb damage assessment. All you would need to do is add some sort of seeker device to the missile and some software modifications.
>Are any cruise missiles launched and then flown around until you notice something of interest to sink?
No they don't, but they can change the target in flight, flight evasive maneuvers, coordinate each others and so on, but they are missiles and not Drones.
It's a flexible distinction. Loitering munitions and combined ISR+kinetic portable weapons are a major focus area for medium to small militaries, and consequently as a product for arms exporters.
The key benefit is providing tactical situational awareness for militaries that may not have such a capability at the strategic level (e.g. optical satellites, high endurance drones, air superiority).
Israeli and Turkish systems were used in the recent Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict.
Let's not be pedantic. From the wikipedia link: "Loitering munitions fit in the niche between cruise missiles and unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) sharing characteristics with both. They differ from cruise missiles in that they are designed to loiter for a relatively long time around the target area, and from UCAVs in that a loitering munition is intended to be expended in an attack and has a built-in warhead."
The article mentions they were VTOL, e.g. vertical take off and landing. They were to land vertically on their tails. It's not a very good idea, particularly with the technology of the time, but a few projects were experimenting with it. The X-13 Vertijet is an example from the 1950s.
The Germans also had the Fi 103R which their test pilots flew a few times but was never put into combat.
As for the reuse of drones, the first drone was a radio controlled de Havilland DH.82 (named Queen Bee.) This drone, and most subsequent drones until fairly recently, was a gunnery target drone. It's job was to be shot down in training, and was only made to fly once (like a drone bee, which dies after mating) The term 'drone' implied a single terminal flight until some years later, when it also came to refer to reusable unmanned aircraft in general.
Cruise missile delivered mine is something to think about... Plenty of close in guns and missiles to prevent direct attack, yet you could very rapidly area-denial an area with cruise missile delivered mines.
If a naval patrol covers more than two hours per leg, they can deny incoming missiles from directly hitting a carrier or whatever but they can't deny missiles incoming 100 miles away at the same time. Either way it prevents the carrier from operating in the area.
Cruise missile carrying submarines are a staple of the US strategy. Every significant engagement starts by such a submarine rolling in and unleashing the cruise missiles to suppress the enemy air defences. And again the cruise missiles are pilotless aircraft in everything but name.