The problem with military white elephants like battleships or F-35's is not that they aren't effective in their dream engagement it's that they eat so much of t

The problem with military white elephants like battleships or F-35's is not that they aren't effective in their dream engagement it's that they eat so much of the budget that the forces wielding them loose the ability to engage in more dispersed real world engagement against an enemy willing to adopt their strategies. 20% better at 3x the cost is usually a bad bargain in a battlefield increasingly dominated by dispersion strategies and that was what eventually killed the Battleships, they were to expensive for convoy duty and too slow and vulnerable to torpedo and air attacks for the line of battle fighting that actually happened doing WWII.