Give the littoral combat ship the striking power it needs

In the 1980s when I was a young ensign, Navy Secretary John Lehman was fervently working to acquire a 600-ship Navy to confront our adversaries around the globe. With a desire to ensure the old maxim that “quantity has a quality all its own,” we came close to achieving this goal.

Yet those halcyon days have passed. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the ensuing “peace dividend,” our Navy has been downsized to the point where we have effectively cut our fleet in half.