Put My Name On It

you seem to not be aware of the Great White Fleet.

 

There's a reason they started mothballing all the battleships after WWII and didn't make any new ones to replace them.

Battleships are defined by heavy armor belts which made them capable of shrugging off damage from the main guns of other ships. That is the naval definition of a battleship. The paradigm was the HMS Dreadnought launched by the British around 1900. The tradeoff is all that armor made them slow as hell and extremely immobile which makes them floating targets. But they were basically almost bulletproof, so it was a solid tradeoff. Doesn't matter if you can hit them easily if you can't sink them.

The problem is during WWII people went all in on aircraft carriers that could shoot torpedoes or drop bombs on those battleships and sink them and radar guided fire control that made zeroing in on them easy. After WWII people invented chemical warheads (shaped charge) and sea skimming cruise missiles with huge warheads that could cut through anything and standoff guided missiles fired from airplanes out of range of battleship guns and all kinds of other crap that has no problem burning through armor belts no matter how thick it was.

So what you end up with is big, slow, unmaneuverable ships with armor that can't stop any weapons designed to sink ships. That is why literally every navy in the world got rid of their battleships and nobody has made any for 50 years.

The only reason Reagan reactivated them in the 80s was to use them as big floating gun barges to shoot deep onshore, but only when there was no chance of being shot at by opposing forces. You could only use them when you had total naval domination, and a very long period of time to stage them because they were so slow.

If they really are actual by-the-definition battleships they are ****ing obsolete boondoggles and will be completely useless deathtraps in real modern naval conflict. They will be suicide machines.

More likely they are cruisers or destroyers that Trump is choosing to call battleships because he thinks it sounds cool. That's major small dick energy, but I guess its better than sending thousands of Americans to their certain death so Trump can LARP as naval commander at The Battle of The Surigao Strait.

Its either branding bullshit and ego onanism, or a dilettante going all in on the foolishness of hopelessly obsolete paradigm because he watched Victory at Sea too many times at 3am after an adderall binge. Neither is a particularly good look.

I guess it'll make the rubes feel strong and stand up and cheer, though. That's about the only thing Trump's good at. I promise you every foreign navy is either scratching their head or laughing. Its like Trump just announced a new line of Trump-Sopwith Camel biplanes or new Trump branded horse cavalry divisions. A retro-navy is not a good idea. I know Trump wants to return the nation to the 1850s, but reinvesting in obsolete 19th century technology is taking it too far.

 

The Great White Father.

 

I'm legit mildly surprised he has yet to rename the Republican Party.

 

Fantastic analysis.

 

You mean MAGA?

 

His Legacy will be Grift Grime Pedophilia and human trafficking

Rocket River

 

Mansions of Glory.

 

I don't think anyone is advocating rebuilding the Battleship Texas (WW1 era) or the Iowa class, or hell, even the Zumwalts. but admittedly, i'm not that sure what these ships are. at ~35k tons, they're considerably smaller than the Iowas, which were 60k tons. they're also bigger than the Zumwalts, which if memory serves, are the current largest US surface combatants (not including carriers). i follow several naval folk on X, and they all seem pleased with the announcement, if not the branding.

if nothing else, keeping American shipyards busy is a good thing.

Speaking of Dreadnought, this is an excellent book:

https://a.co/d/9jF8GvM

as is the sequel, Castles of Steel:

https://a.co/d/7CAsXTN

 

His legacy will be that of a demented not smart Nixon.

 

Im not trying to start an argument here, truly I'm not, but respectfuly I disagree.

If they are just a jobs program producing underperforming expensive trash like the Independence Class LCS, that ends up massively diverting money effort and resources from giving the US Navy the things they want and need to do the job they are tasked with doing. (To be clear, the Independence class was something the Navy said it needed, but where they went wrong was in letting ambitious shipbuilders and defense contrsctors get involved in designing and buliding out the overly ambitious systems details.)

I haven't seen any concerted lobying from the Navy before now clamoring for respurces to build newer and heavier classes of surface combatants. This serms like a prestige project for Trump in search of a mission. The mission capability you want should come first, with the ship being designed to fill it. Not the other way around.

If each one of these "battleships" means the navy can't afford two or three new modernized destroyers with cutting edge air defense capabilities that the Navy wants and says it needs, that's not good for America. Its only about making Trump feel like a big man at the expense of our naval readiness.

The naval budget is kind of a zero sum game. Spending resourses on ships the Navy doesn't organically from the ground up believe they need is robbing Peter to pay Paul.

 

We need very fast ships capable of launching thousands of drones in a heartbeat.

ships are slow. Drones are fast.

Drones are the future.

 

the Navy is also getting its new frigate, and modernizing the AB's, as well as upgrading the Zumwalts. again, despite the name, the Trump ships are large destroyers or small cruisers.

 

An email teaser I just got from The Bulwark. The rest of it is paid content, so I'm not going to post it, but he is much more harsh about it than I was, calling it "more Trump vaporwear" suggesting a high likelyhood they'll never be built.

He make a great point that there's no way in hell they're putting unfinished experimental weapons like raill guns on ships and having them done and sailing in 2.5 years. The US railgun development program began in 2005 and was still unfinished with issues they were having trouble solving when it was canceled in 2021.

Honestly his assertion that there is little likelyhood they'll ever be built makes me feel much better about it. Trump can preen and strut if it makes him feel like a strongman and the taxpayers won't have to pay for it beyond the design and research stages.

Like I said, everything past that is paid content, but its validating that I'm not the only person who is extremely skeptical.