"Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
Aristophanes, 444 BC - 385 BC
I guess the world has only gone worse and worse since then, and I'm pretty sure the youth of now will grumble about how the then new generation sucks while they enlisted for their country to go to Afghanistan, had to face the collapse of the social contract their own parents known (in which college could easily be paid with a part-time job, when simple jobs were highly-paying thanks to the lack of overseas competition and when corporations had a bit of loyalty to their employees). It is our fate, the fate of everyone who lives long enough, to end up complaining about "these kids now". And if you want a more modern reference than Aristophanes, Back To The Future works pretty well too. ;-)
PS: oh, and by the way, that quote from Aristophanes was in a comedy play where he makes Socrates or Plato say it, because it was already cliche, back in Ancient Greece.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ikalugin
While I agree with you that many of those missions can be completed with FFGs the problem is that US needs to maintain dominance in naval theatres which means that they need all those DDGs and if anything I think that the decision to focus on them was a good one given limited USN resources post Cold War.
As to the crews - USN is known to deploy intentionally larger than normal crews as this makes at sea maintenance and the like easier.
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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.