I apologize about babbling so much on your blog about concrete aircraft carriers, but I posted mostly the same thing on Scipio Americanus’s site, and it didn’t show up. I wanted to get the idea out there as I had been thinking about it a while. While he may not run the Navy’s spending budget ,it’s amazing where an idea at the right time with the right person moves things sometimes seemingly inexplicably. I have a cousin who was an Air Force general, and at the top and at various choke points in the bureaucracy there’s often very few people making long-lasting decisions. Reading Jerry Pournelle for years also clued me into this, as he and others were doing very much the same sort of work as Scipio Americanus, and it gave us the Air Force we have today. My worry is that the US defense budget seems to be following the path of the book, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, with almost complete play by play. It’s very disturbing to watch what I perceive as folly blindly unfolding.