Quote:
Originally Posted by Rufus Shinra
Can't maintain dominance without working crews, and considering its current levels of spending plus the limited population reservoir for tech-intensive jobs that have to compete with the private sector, this isn't a sustainable trajectory taken by the US military, particularly as China builds itself up with a much larger population base and more concentrated geographical ambitions. So, nah, this isn't a race that can be run for a long time, neither on the economics, politics or human fronts. Something is going to break if it keeps going, might be the budget, the crews or the political ambitions.
Remember what happened with the Soviet Union when it tried to keep up with a larger economy and population base: China is more than satisfied to build up in a way that pushes the US to build more with an ever growing impact on the budget as well as on the manpower.
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Hard choices, I know. But then the better path to increasing the number of crews with the same pool would be the more automated rather than smaller ships, for example compare Russian and US submarines. This choice makes even more sense when you consider the division of labour between US and allies, with countries like Japan providing suplimentary capabilities like SSKs.
As to the economics - it was mostly about doing all three of Gorbachev's policies at the same time (now for the history quiz - what were they?) rather than the size etc.