re: #94 CuriousLurker

Ship procurements are messy business. There’s a lot of politics involved because a lot of jobs are at stake (that’s right, defense spending is a jobs project.)

My take ( a long time ago) is that competing forces within and outside the Navy makes for ship procurements driven first by politics.

Operationally, the challenge the Navy faces is whether the old big-picture tradeoffs (e.g., several small boats versus a few large ones, the role of air power in the Navy, national strategic assets versus traditional naval combat, etc.) are carefully regroomed to fit whatever the politicians want.

I concluded a few decades back that many Navy assets are sitting ducks and only because the US has had no major naval wars in 70 years we can keep pretending big gray boats are not sitting ducks.

If I was running the ship I would put money in littoral combat and submarines, but the aircraft carriers and the big destroyers make for prettier propaganda and that is another political battle.