From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro.

This is a day like this.

A mid-a growing threat from rivals like China, the United States military is determined

to invest in new forms of defense and abandon those that no longer meet its needs.

One of those is a combat ship, rife with flaws.

Today, my colleague Eric Lipton on why getting rid of that ship has proven so unexpectedly

difficult.

It's Monday, February 13th.

Eric, tell us about these warships that you have been investigating and why it is that

the US government ordered them in the first place.

So it really goes back to the September 11th, 2001 attacks when the United States was thinking

about new types of enemies that it was going to be facing into the future.

It was concerned about rogue states, smaller, perhaps non-country actors that were coming

after Navy assets.

It needed a new kind of a ship that was really fast, that could travel in shallow waters,

that could search for enemies in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, and in other places

around the world.

Next thing you know, it's considering taking on this pretty challenging assignment of

conceiving of an entirely new type of ship that can do all these different kinds of

things at once.

So in this era where our greatest fear is terrorism, the US is looking for a particular

kind of ship that can confront that very particular kind of threat.

...