If I may, I find fault with your premise about aircraft.The domination of airspace is of significant importance to modern military doctrine, in fact I would argue that airspace is the most important part of the modern battlefield based on "recent" conflicts in israel, the falklands, iraq, and afghanistan. One of the strengths of aircraft is their ability to move heavy ordnance extreme ranges. The reason the aircraft carrier replaced the battleship is directly related to this (think of a plane as a direct replacement for naval rifles). Keeping this in mind one must appreciate that aerial warfare is its own unique realm of warfare like the land and sea and therefore planes cannot be eclipsed by technology as you put it like the battleship because as an environment the air offers its own unique set of challenges and advantages that must be met with specialized vehicles ie planes. To say then that "Eventually technology will catch up with aircraft, and defeat them." is no different from than saying technology will catch up with ships and defeat them.
All you have to do is attack the plane outside of the parameters or flight characteristics a pilot can survive, such as G-Forces, or attach it with weapons too quick to react against, such as lasers.
While it is true that alot of dogfighting success comes from playing to the relative strengths/flight characteristics of the aircraft involved the vast majority of aerial kills come from quick slashing surprise attacks one need only look at the fighting styles of high scoring aces like hartman to see this. So a weapon that, as you put it, attacks from outside a plane's parameters is not necessarily ideal.
Furthermore, it must be remembered that anything attacking a plane is subject to the same laws of physics the plane is. If we look at the work of Boyd, specifically his energy-maneuverability theory and apply those principles (which are true for everything in the air) to missiles we find that weapons that aren't launched from aircraft have a serious energy disadvantage to overcome against a jet. Even if a missile is physically capable of pulling a high G turn that surpasses the limitations of its target its aircraft specific energy may not be high enough to sustain such a maneuver once it closes enough with its target for such a turn to be necessary. Missile guidance algorithms do not simply follow the target rather they try to plot the intercept course to the target that best conserves the missile's specific energy; as you can imagine high G turns are not very good for a missile's limited energy and are to be avoided.
Also lasers are still subject to the same tracking problems all other ground/sea based AA systems are (though their trajectories are simpler) and theoretically more exposed to beam riders if one decides to be clever and install a seeker that not only hunts radar by high intensity laser light as well.
Chemical lasers, perhapes even condensing the beam by slowing it. Light has been slowed to about the speed of a bycicle in the labs. When released, would it continue at that speed or go back to its origional. If you could slow a 1 second beam, and release it in far less time, would you have converted your beam to somthing which would consentrate 186, 000 miles of energy into a say 3 foot length.
When light is slowed in a lab all the scientists are doing is passing light through a medium with an exceptionally high refractive index so you can't condense and release light the way you are describing.
Blue green lasers penetrate water easially, among other ideas for submarine detection. Remember any submarine is remarkably easy to kill if it is found.
The advantage of these laser systems lie in the fact that they can passively detect submarines, however this does not change the fact that you are trying to search an impossibly large area when hunting a submarine and that any submarine that is a threat to you is more then likely already keenly aware of your movements and actions long before that shiver runs down your spine.
I think in the future these new laser based systems will be used to supplement acoustic tracking in much the same way magnetic anomaly detectors do. While interesting I hardly find future ASW systems game changing and firmly believe that submarines will remain the greatest threat to surface fleets well into the future.
Extremely high speed rail guns, with guided shells.
Already happened mate its called an electromagnetic catapult and an F18 loaded for bear
All kidding aside I don't really see a future for rail guns beyond a modernized CIWIS that uses them in combination with lasers.
I really don't like the concept of guided shells in general because I feel that their development is really just an excuse to keep big guns around especially with the advent of counter battery radar which makes rapidly firing missile systems like the MLRS preferable in a classic artillery role; plus I think that almost everything from the artillery piece to the lowly rocket launcher will be eclipsed by the development of UAVs which with their extreme payload and loiter times can place a bang of any size quickly and precisely wherever you want on the battlefield.
Long range missiles, although against railguns they might be useless, due to being intercepted.
Since this is purely theoretical might I remind you of ICBMs? Take away the nuclear tip and replace it with something a bit more conventional and I think you will find yourself looking at something so long ranged and ridiculously fast that your rail gun hardly stands a chance. In any case missile interception is a very tricky business that is unlikely to ever really be put to bed as you imply no matter how fast your bullets are.
Would surface ships again become the king of battle, and would range be reduced to line of sight.
Sadly I think not; I personally believe that we will see the greatest change in the airwing of carriers which will become a mix of highly upgraded F35s and various UAVs (I don't think we will ever see a truly new manned aircraft just upgrades scaled to ridiculous levels like the superhornet which beneath the skin is almost nothing like the original F18). I don't expect our current crop of a cruiser/destroyer to change much major changes will include lower RCS and distributed electrical power generation systems. As far as subs are concerned they'll just get quieter and that's about it. Oh and no more 5-inch guns!
Cheers!
