This is.

This is John Batcher, conversation with my good friend Jerry Hendrix,

Captain Jerry Hendrix, United States Navy retired aviator.

An article he posted many years ago 2009 naval proceedings entitled by Fords, not Ferraris, meaning that the Navy has a prejudice

to load up capital ships with lots of weapons, make them very, very sophisticated and dangerous, but makes

them expensive.

And Jerry describes that tension within naval planning and how it applies. that in order to do the work that the Arley Burke destroyer class, which is a battleship, is now doing in the Western Pacific.

Why do they get loaded up? Why do they slow down? Why are they so expensive? Here's Jerry Hendricks.

Captain Jerry Hendricks on Navy shipbuilding. More of this later. A competition that occurs within Naval Sea Systems Command when we're designing platforms.

And this is something that I worry about even when we talk about unmanned, which is this balance between capabilities versus capacity.

And when you have a limited budget, what you want, and you can only buy a limited number

of platforms with that limited budget then what you

want is for those platforms to have more capabilities and so you start loading

them up with additional systems where it's sensors or weapons and then they become more expensive and as

they become more expensive with a flat budget then you can buy fewer of them and then the

impetus is there to load them up still more and so you create an increasingly

exquisite force whether it's naval ships or submarines or whatnot. The fact is

is one of the arguments I make is you know simplify come down single

mission platforms or dual mission platforms but make them less expensive so that I can

buy them in larger numbers