It's annoying when articles like this blindly repeat misinformation:<p>> On March 9, 1862, the Union warship Monitor met its Confederate counterpart, Virginia. After a four-hour exchange of fire, the two fought to a draw. It was the first battle of ironclads. In one day, every wooden ship of the line of every naval power became immediately obsolete.<p>Ouch, false. The ironclad ships that the US built were what became known as "[river] monitors"--they were at best barely seaworthy, since they had no freeboard worth speaking of, so any sea that was mildly stalled would cause the ships to founder. In no way were they ships-of-the-line, or capable of threatening ships-of-the-line, and the first ironclad ship-of-the-line would have been HMS Warrior, built <i>before</i> the US ironclads.<p>> On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. If the battle of the ironclads settled once and for all the wood-versus-iron debate, Japanese carrier-based aircraft settled the battleship-versus-carrier debate by sinking the cream of America’s battleship fleet in a single morning.<p>Even worse than the previous paragraph. Aircraft carriers did not render battleships obsolete at Pearl Harbor, which involved a fleet of <i>old</i> battleships at a state of low readiness. If the Japanese thought battleships obsolete, why did they bring them to the Battle of Midway 6 months later?<p>One of the things that I think is poorly comprehended by much of the lay public is that military technology really is "part of a complete package". There isn't a single technology that beats everything else; instead, it tends to end up closer to a rock-paper-scissors scenario where it turns out you need <i>all</i> of the weapon systems to avoid being defeated by one of them. For example, in WW1-ish naval warfare, a large capital ship like a battleship is vulnerable to torpedoes, which means it needs a fleet screen of light units to avoid the torpedo threat, but those units are vulnerable to the powerful capabilities of battleships, which requires capital ships of their own to threaten.<p>What makes technology obsolete isn't "this can be countered by something else," it's "this capability can be provided by something better."