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Synopsis: Jerry gets hooked on an anime (that’s animation from Japan) cartoon he discovers late one night but can’t remember what channel it was on. Kramer finds the channel but keeps it a secret because he’s become infatuated with with one of the female characters and doesn’t want to share her. George and Elaine get mugged.

Criticizing the logic of the Navy endlessly waiting for Godot in terms of frigate design without ever examining the even more lopsided logic of how the Navy is supposed to use that frigate is self-defeating. Currently, the idea is that the Navy will use said frigate to fight a war on the other side of the Pacific, against an industrially superior power, while lacking the capacity to sustain logistics, replace casualties, or repair combat damage. No serious American military planner from the mid-twentieth century (back when the United States enjoyed a massive industrial advantage compared to the rest of the world) would consider this to be a coherent or practical goal to begin with. Let us thus put the real nature of the issue at stake in the most blunt terms possible: the Navy is being asked to maintain the dream of the American empire. Lacking a political class willing to seriously acknowledge or address the very real crisis this empire now faces, the burden of that political crisis is being shifted onto the shoulders of admirals and generals who were never intended to take on that role in the first place, nor do they have the capability to do so. Yet even so, by promising some unspecified, undefinable capability at some hazy point in the future, the Navy is, in its own peculiar way, doing the best job it can with the hand it has been dealt. This job cannot be done by delivering a handful of unremarkable Italian frigates, frigates the Navy cannot realistically repair in wartime nor fully crew in peacetime in any case. The Navy is not just building ships; it is trying to shield an increasingly fragile American leadership class from reality, and like the other services, it is paying a ruinous cost to do so.

The underling issue that Navy leadership has to deal with is that the main scenario the Navy is supposed to prepare for—a kinetic war against China—is actually completely nonsensical, or at least it would have appeared as such to mid-twentieth century military planners. The Pentagon itself estimates that China’s shipbuliding capacity today is roughly 230 times greater than America’s. Many Japanese elites, most notably Admiral Yamamoto himself, were extremely skeptical of the idea that any sort of combination of tactics and strategy could make up for the gulf in industrial potential between Imperial Japan and America, and yet that advantage was an order of magnitude less than the advantage enjoyed by China today; it was far closer to ten to one than a hundred to one. To add insult to injury, one of the central themes of the ultimately disastrous Japanese doctrine of Kantai Kessen—decisive naval battle doctrine—was to leverage the vast size of the Pacific Ocean itself to partially make up for the difference in industrial capacity. The (ultimately vain) Japanese hope was that America would have to stretch its supply lines to the point where the Imperial Japanese Navy could still hope to engage in set piece battles under locally favorable conditions. The Japanese imagined themselves using the tyranny of distance to draw America into one or several confrontations in the mold of the battle of Tsushima, after which the American public or its military planners would hopefully conclude that a protracted war in the Pacific simply wasn’t worth it, resulting in a negotiated settlement where both sides recognized the other’s sphere of influence. The disastrous failure of many of the assumptions underpinning this doctrine would end up dooming the Japanese Empire, but at least the Japanese doctrine made some measure of basic sense. No Japanese planner, no matter how optimistic they were about Japan’s chances, even considered for a second the idea that a war with America was somehow going to be winnable if it had to be fought off the Californian coast.