Old hull architecture limits modernisation

The Arleigh Burke class offers a comparatively favourable example of the limits of repeated design evolution. New flights add modern sensors and systems, but the underlying concept still grows from 1970s theory and a 1980s design. The crowded Flight III profile shows how much new technology is being fitted into inherited architecture. Russia faces a harder problem because it is modernising roughly forty-year-old hulls based on still older assumptions. Refits must work around design decisions made long before the replacement systems existed, and repeated modernisation cannot overcome those inherited assumptions indefinitely.