Walter Pincus asks adroitly why our U.S. Navy will need 300 ships in 2022 "if the ones we keep building are so much more effective than the ones we had in the past" (The Fed Page Funding the defense needs of tomorrow today February 16). And why would we continue to commit to so many highly vulnerable surface ships when a fleet of mostly submersible ships would seem so much more efficient and effective? The aircraft carrier is a floating dinosaur in this current age of highly accurate cruise missiles,  and for that same reason it is purely an anachronism to put now-outdated human-piloted bombers into the air. 


And why risk the enormous cost and training of putting humans, error-prone by nature, into any aircraft other than those for rescue when remotely-piloted drones for nearly every purpose are clearly the wave of the future? Let's hope that our government is not falling into the conventional trap of building our new Navy for an old war.