Thomas T. that’s exactly what they are saying. It’s a very telling acknowledgement of where we are. I believe they are acknowledging that losing tankers in support of combat strikes is going to be a regular cost of carrying out those strikes. I wonder how many strikes we have in us under those conditions? What is very sobering, for anyone who knows their WWII history, is that in major conflicts with powerful adversaries, we have had our share of setbacks and heavy losses as we gained hard-won experience, came to understand both the impact of new technologies on warfare, learned about the skills and strengths of our adversaries, and weeded out our own ineffective leaders. Simply put, the Japanese initially hurt us (and the Brits) very badly, and I’m not talking about Pearl Harbor. I’m talking about the first two years of our offensive operations. We ultimately prevailed in the Pacificbecause we had the industrial base to build upon to replace things the Japanese destroyed, enough people and the organizational infrastructure to train replacements, and the ability to rapidly develop and field new weapons based on experience. I doubt we have all of those capacities now, having outsourced our industrial base and manufacturing know-how. We need to start rebuilding military and industrial depth right now or we won’t have the resilience we are going to need. The Ukrainian conflict has given us a view into the impact of new technologies, just as the Spanish Civil war did in Europe on the eve of WWII. Whether we absorb and act upon those lessons is another question. The Ukrainian conflict is also spotlighting our difficulty in manufacturing replacements of the consumables and equipment we are giving Ukraine. I’m not seeing anyone acknowledging that deterring our adversaries, and, if necessary, winning a conflict, is going to cost us, and we’re going to need to tax ourselves and tighten a belt notch or two to pay for what we need to do. Sorry to be grim, but this small story is a window into a much bigger problem that we ignore at our peril. Perhaps we can rally around this existential cause, even if we disagree on many other things.