Author: Thomas Ricks

Note: We’re revisiting some of our most popular material from the past 10 months for our newer readers; this was originally posted January 6, 2014. Enjoy!

By Thomas E. Ricks

Want a better U.S. military? Make it a smaller one. The bigger today’s military, the more time it has to spend taking care of itself, maintaining and replicating itself as it is, instead of changing with the times. And changing is what the U.S. military begins to do as it recovers from the two wars of the last decade.

For example, the U.S. Navy recently launched the USS Gerald R. Ford, an aircraft carrier with a price tag of perhaps $13.5 billion. It has some modern aspects, such as a smaller crew, a better radar, and a different means of launching aircraft, but it basically looks like the aircraft carriers the United States has been building for the last half century. And that means it has a huge “radar signature,” making it highly visible. In an era of global satellite imagery and long-range precision missiles (neither of which existed when the Ford’s first rancestors were built), that could be very dangerous. As Navy Capt. Henry Hendrix, a naval historian and aviator, wrote earlier this year, today’s carrier is, like the massive battleships that preceded it, “big, expensive, vulnerable – and surprisingly irrelevant to the conflicts of the time.” What use is a carrier if the missiles that can hit it have a range twice as long as the range of the carrier’s aircraft? It is like putting a short-armed boxer in the ring with one who has a far longer reach.