Liberals Confuse Sneering With Intellectual Confidence

Not strategy, just the care and feeding of Obama's base.

Obama’s argument — if that’s not too generous a word — is that the Navy in particular, and the military in general, can do so much more because of technological advances.

And that is certainly true.

But it’s also true that there have been huge advances in the technology used to sink our ships and blow up our planes as well. And, to date, no breakthrough innovation has led us to figuring out how to put one ship in two places at once.

There’s another problem. What innovation does he have in mind? Many of our warplanes and nearly all of our major naval vessels are much older than the pilots and sailors flying and sailing them. It’s great to talk up the benefits of innovation, but that argument starts to sputter when you realize we are often relying on the innovation of older generations. For all his talk about the game Battleship, we haven’t built a real battleship in almost 70 years, and the Navy hasn’t had one in its arsenal for decades.