"Let me see if I have this right," Little Rock said. "You retired the Perrys—nice design by the way. The first was still being built when I retired the second time. Shame I never had the chance to serve with one of them—so you decided to build a replacement. Actually building a replacement capable of all the jobs you wanted it capable of doing was too expensive, and buying a bunch of different ship classes the same, so you decided to build a modular ship that could be modified for specific missions. Do I have that part right?"

"Pretty much."

"And you did this all because your attempt to build a replacement destroyer resulted in a ship so capable, and so expensive, that a 32-member class was reduced to only three. And despite the cost of designing, proofing, and installing two brand new and very capable guns—and ammunition for them—that the cost per-round for those guns was so high it was decided not to buy any, leaving them with just their missiles. And, I note, that 80-cell missile capacity is a ten percent reduction of the first flight of destroyers they were intended to replace. Is that correct?

"Never mind. I apologize for the segue. Something that happens when you get old, your mind goes places. Actually building all these mission modules would have been more expensive than building your one really capable ship. And since they'd be mostly sitting in storage it didn't make sense to actually make them, right? Which means that for all intents and purposes you have a bunch of smaller, less-capable ships that you spent money to engineer to be modular, but that isn't a capability that is used."

"Well…"

"I'm not finished," Little Rock said. "You wanted them small enough and cheap enough that you could order a bunch of them…okay. I get that. You also weren't sure which design you wanted so you ordered one of each, okay. This makes sense so far. But then you went on ordering both classes."

"Ah—"

"That wasn't actually a question," Little Rock said. "My question, and this is important so I want you to really think about it before you answer because I'm not the only one who is going to be asking this. What the devil was being thought when it was decided to give my name to a toibotte?" A finger jabbed out and USS Little Rock (LCS-9) strained against her mooring ropes to avoid it.