Just This Once,
"This high value target relies on others for protection, so we must hope that this works out ok. Such reliance on others has never been tried before so I guess we need to keep our fingers crossed."
Er, you are totally ignoring history, and fairly recent history at that. For the whole of its life with Phantoms and Buccaneers HMS Ark Royal was armed with nothing more lethal than ceremonial saluting cannon. Yet nobody questioned its vulnerability, in fact it was widely publicised as the most powerful warship in the history of the Royal Navy.
So I guess it has been tried before. And in a era where we only had 8 destroyers and the average Frigate was armed with 4.5 inch guns and manually aimed Seacat...