As proven in WWII, with the Liberty Ship, quantity has a quality all its own.
While having a smaller fleet of highly capable combatants is nice, there is something to be said for the screens of lesser vessels which have traditionally protected those star players. Nor are the actions of those lesser vessels to be denied in combat, sometimes taking on overwhelming odds and prevailing.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/uss-samuel-b-roberts-destroyer.html (Battle of Leyte Gulf).
The predictable strategy of any enemy will be to target those most capable vessels with overwhelming attacks of relatively low value assets, manned, ballistic, guided, unmanned, or a combination of those. The question is one of how to defeat those attacks and maintain combat capability, and one way to do that might be unmanned drones capable of acting as decoys to deceive incoming enemy attack assets and deflect all or part of that attack, increasing survivability for the high value combatants. While those drones might not count as ships until seen on enemy targeting displays, they could have an important effect on the conduct of battle and on the enemy's perception of the battle space. One would not want to advertise the capability to deploy such vessels or devices, manned or unmanned, and advertising capability at some point only gives enemy munitions developers and strategists target numbers and capabilities to aim for.
