The Enterprise is a vessel that defies the landlubber's imagination. It is more than 1,100ft long and its flight deck is 250ft across. It is as high … - Paul Kennedy

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The Enterprise is a vessel that defies the landlubber's imagination. It is more than 1,100ft long and its flight deck is 250ft across. It is as high as a 20-storey building... But this super-dreadnought never travels alone. It is always accompanied, at the very least, by an Aegis-type cruiser, a large surface ship designed to shoot down incoming missiles; by a bevy of frigates and destroyers to protect it from enemy submarines; by a lurking hunter-killer submarine or two; and by some supply vessels and other specialised craft. Marine troops and their helicopters will be in the task force. In offensive and defensive terms, this is a behemoth... What is more, no equivalent concentration of power to a US carrier task force exists in the world; the few UK, French and Indian carriers are minuscule by comparison, the Russian ones rusting away.

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About Paul Kennedy

Paul Michael Kennedy CBE FBA (born 17 June 1945) is a British historian specialising in the history of international relations, economic power and grand strategy. He is on the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals and writes for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many foreign-language newspapers and magazines. His monthly column on current global issues is distributed worldwide by the Tribune Content Agency. He has published on the history of British foreign policy and great power struggles, emphasizing the changing economic power base that undergirds military and naval strength, noting how declining economic power leads to reduced military and diplomatic weight.

Also Known As

Birth Name: Paul Michael Kennedy
Alternative Names: Paul M. Kennedy Paul M Kennedy
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Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have returned to all of the comparative defence spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years that I compiled in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and no other nation comes close. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap, Britain's army was much smaller than European armies, and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies – right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy.

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The emperors, kings, prime ministers and presidents of great powers have always preferred the heady world of diplomacy, war and international affairs to the unglamorous realm of fiscal reform, educational change and domestic renewal. That is understandable, since they will go down in history as leaders of this or that spectacular demonstration of the country's still-powerful military capacity. It is left to later generations to pay the price.

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