But they looked really cool.
Anywhere near the coast of China, a warship is within range of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.[2] Lots of them. If there's a war over Taiwan, the Taiwan Strait will be a no-go zone for US warships. Being near a hostile coast held by someone with modern weapons is death to a navy today. The sinking of the Moskva was the first demonstration of this, and Ukraine has since taken out about eight more Russian warships and many smaller craft, using various missiles and drones.
[1] https://hmshood.org.uk/history/bcorigins.htm
[2] https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/china-s-df-27-miss...
It’s geriatric hype. It tells you how the administration is thinking about the Navy: in terms someone born in the 1940s—and who never refreshed their assumptions since childhood—can understand.
What we should have are floating, automated drone-production platforms that can be mass manufactured themselves and shipped to right ahead of the front for overwhelming the enemy’s sea-based defences (while F-35s take care of SEAD). Instead we get Popeye with a rail gun.
It's not like taking crude, cracking it, then refining the plastics, yadda yadda yadda. It's more an fast automated assembly thing.
The thing which stands out about VLS systems is the salvo fire capability of them: VLS tubes can launch an entire ships ammo complement in as little as 60 seconds or so. Which is a massive advantage because it means if a ship is targeted it can still potentially service every single target in range before it's in any danger of actually being hit.
There's a minimum tonnage needed to mount a big enough radar, have a hanger for a helicopter, and plenty of room for VLS, RAM, etc.
But past that, it's better to distribute your assets across multiple vessels vs building one dramatically larger ship.
It's far better to have 4x Arleigh Burke style ships than one behemoth that's 4x the tonnage.
Heck, this was true even at the end of the battleship era. Just look at how useless the Yamato proved to be. And it's doubly true now in an era of very sophisticated anti ship missiles.
Also, conceiving of this in terms of single platforms is also just totally wrong. We assemble surface action groups with a mix of capabilities that match the situation. Some of our Burkes focus on anti aircraft warfare, other's anti submarine, so we send a mix. And when they're on station each hull can be in the location best suited to its task.
So really you have to think about the whole package, and the arsenal ship just doesn't offer anything desirable on that basis.
And then it has to go back to base to reload. Reloading at sea is marginally possible. The U.S. Navy has demonstrated it recently, in harbor. But it's not done routinely with live ammo yet. This is a known weak point.
It would still involve putting two or more ships in close proximity with heavy lift equipment for an extended time.
If this is close to the front it's a target, if it's not then you could reload VLS cells, and to do it your sacrificing the ability to put munitions on targets quickly which might just cost you the entire ship.
It's not even clear it saves you any reload time, since the only potential benefit is that shells are somewhat smaller then missiles, and even then once you account for magazine design and survivability I'd say the trade off is questionable at best.
VLS requires that you reload missile by missile at the place they’re fired from the top, which requires you have crane access to each VLS cell. You could replace the many non-reloadable tubes with fewer, reloadable tubes connected via loaders to magazines… but we’re starting down the path to re-inventing guns.
And again, you're paying for all of this in the form of far slower firing guns with less range and precision.
Getting robots to fold towels is currently a struggle.
Unmanned drones make sense because they are more capable. That's not the case with most ships.
Not to mention China's attack submarines, with their own anti-ship missiles as well as old-fashioned torpedoes. They have proven their ability to pop up and say "hello!" to US warships in the past. [0] Getting that close wouldn't be as easy when everyone is on a wartime footing, but then again, US ships would be steaming right towards them...
[0] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2007/january/worl...
Note this is one of the material motivations for the CCP gaining control over Taiwan. They'd quite like to move their submarine basing to the east side of the island as a practical matter. It's got deep water and plenty of cliffs/mountains suitable for hardened docks/shelters.
I agree that's generally true and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Thinking it through, though: if Japan is party to the conflict its naval assets are likely to be much closer to China, and China will need to keep some assets nearby in the East China Sea to honor the threat regardless.
To be honest the thing that's puzzled me about the Izumo-class ships since I read about them and the conversion they are undergoing to carry F-35Bs is where exactly they'd be safe to operate in a conflict against China. It's not like those planes have great range, and it's not like refueling is usually going to be an option, so if they're going to be put to use those ships are going to be in range of an awful lot of stuff. And what a juicy target for China.
> The Taiwan strait is too shallow for submarines to operate
Is that true of China's smallest diesel-electric attack subs? I'd think the reason for them not to operate there would be a lack of targets.
edit: I take the latter part back. Apparently mine-laying in the straight by US submarines is hypothetically something that could happen in the conflict, and that would certainly constitute a target for China
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/december/you...
Welcome to 2025. How about those unmanned submarines that can be made dirty cheap?
Do you mean 'battle cruisers'?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser
'Light cruisers' were different again.
>No Japanese or German battleship in WWII survived a determined air attack. Yamato, Tirpiz, Bismark - all lost to air attack.
Bismark was finished off by surface ships after the initial air attack.
Tirpitz took many sorties to sink.
The sinking of the British Prince of Wales and Repulse by the Japanese is probably a better example of how battleships became vulnerable to airpower.
In retrospect the Japanese got a bit lucky there; subsequent air attacks on battleships show they can be remarkably tough. Musashi took 19 torpedo and 17 bomb hits to sink.
Presumably because the british torpedos were so awful, Tirpitz was attacked with regular bombs, which meant they were using the worst method of sinking a ship, from the top down, and so it didn't do much until they whipped out the ultra heavy ones. And it's not like the attacks were going poorly, Tirpitz was taking the hits because it could not kill the planes.
Compare them to the planes that carried out attacks in the Pacific theatre. The Grumman Avenger was maybe 2 generations newer (and actually remained in service until the 1960s(
While the Swordfish looked rather outdated, they were very successful as torpedo bombers.
my guess would be trident sized(2m) silos as the main battery and you fill them with vls cells as a working battery. for armor It needs to be able to defend agenst it's own gun right, so that would probably be a bunch of missile defense systems.
It is often said that aircraft carriers replaced battleships but I don't think that is the case, I think aircraft carriers are kind of their own thing and the battleship role was actually replaced by ballistic missile submarines. Think about it, where are the big guns in the navy located? And the more tenuous but fun argument, look how the ships are named, battleships got state names, SSBN's got state names coincidence, I think not.
truck-mounted? Are you on CCP's payroll to downplay and cover the rise of its military strength?
Chinese navy has YJ-20 hypersonic anti-ship ballistic missile fitted on its Type-055 destroyers. At Mach 10 with 1,500km range, it is the most advanced anti ship missiles ever developed & deployed on the sea. YJ-20 itself is the ship-launched version of the YJ-21, which has been spotted on H-6 bombers for ages. With YJ-20 and YJ-21, you don't get to "coast of China" to experience their "truck-mounted" missiles.
Interestingly, you choose to ignore all these publicly available facts that can be easily verified and try to paint the Chinese navy as some 1980s forces relying on "truck-mounted missiles" for anti ship missions. Well done, you deserve a bonus for your strategic deception job!
If the guided missile cruiser is now the biggest meanest surface unit, I'm fine with calling it a battleship.
Also, if gun caliber and armor plate thickness and speed, etc are less than the Iowa class battleship, the above still stands. It just means that the state of the art in what the biggest baddest ship is has moved on.
The aircraft carrier in many ways already became the new battleship in 1942, and existing battleships became effectively second rate in the sense that a fleet aircraft carrier smokes a battleship, it still does.
Another way to think about it is that guided missile cruisers are kind of another evolution of the aircraft carrier, they launch large numbers of missiles at much less cost.
Of course, the reality is much more complicated. It's unclear how useful guided missile classes and nuclear powered aircraft carriers will be in a standup full blown major power fight, aircraft carriers have sure been nice for asymmetric warfare in relative peacetime.
Why would you take this as an indication of the “best we can do”?
For 'practical best' you'd normally point people to examples of warships the U.S. actually can build without much drama, but if you try this with the Navy you're basically left with, what, the last LPD class?
10 years ago you'd call the Virginia SSNs a success, but even those have now run into construction delays due to various issues, even as the Navy needs their #1 priority (Columbia-class SSBN, also delayed) to succeed to decommission the Ohios on time.
I guess I question this, too. This “battleship” a cartoon drawn for the President. It might damage our fighting ability if built. But it’s not reflective of our practical best.
There is a broader, genuine criticism of American warship building. But this battleship has as much to do with that as do rubber ducks.
Read the original comment they made again. They weren't talking about the proposed battleship at all, but about broader issues the U.S. Navy is already experiencing trying to build the already-approved designs.
> It might damage our fighting ability if built. But it’s not reflective of our practical best.
Indeed, it is beyond our current practical best, even if we assume the cartoon would ever be built. Which is, I suspect, what elicited the comment in the first place.
> The new Trump-class battleships will replace the Navy's previous plans to develop a new class of destroyer, the DDG(X). However, the sea service intends to incorporate the capabilities it had planned to employ on that platform into the new Trump-class ships.
The military-industrial complex we have is the only one we got.
Just Zumwalt and LCS alone are like $50 billion burned up for nothing.
The Navy's issues with procurement go all the way back to the retiring of the Oliver Hazard Perry class without a suitable replacement in the pipeline.
Like many big tough men in power (and the broken culture and society that put them there), the parade army better serves their goals.
This was literally my first reaction when reading the description/seeing the picture
Millions—if not billions—of dollars are likely to be wasted on this over the coming years.
"Spending billions" is meaningless concern until you ask the question: what would these people have been doing instead?
I suspect that the "ball room" attachment to the White House will also still be a hole by the end of the administration, but a lot of money will get handed out.
In other words, yes it is billions pushed back into the economy, and yes, there will likely be very little "permanent" to show for it (and presumably the navy won't be much better for it) but it's not like they're just burying the cash.
It's important to understand that for the military industrial complex the goal is to "feed the machine", not actually to produce anything. In that sense this money is not wasted, it's doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
The battleship was clearly vulnerable to airpower in WWII. Much less so in WW1.
Even the name is flawed.
You’re the first one in this thread mentioning him.
https://www.twz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/USS-Defiant-T...
If we are extremely lucky the outcome of this will be increased shipyard capacity and refined shipbuilding practices just in time to switch back to building a multitude of actually-useful ships.
But most likely is that this ends up delaying the U.S.'s ability to build back its navy in time to matter, which is a tremendous issue given how we do our commerce and where some of our deepest friends are physically located.
https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/436695...
> The new Trump-class battleships will replace the Navy's previous plans to develop a new class of destroyer, the DDG(X). However, the sea service intends to incorporate the capabilities it had planned to employ on that platform into the new Trump-class ships.
I think there needs to be more awareness on how dire the navies situation is. Most Americans assume the 100s of Billions per year to the USN keeps us at some unparalleled level, but that doesn't seem likely to hold true.
Unintentionally, but to incredible effect, the current American regime has exploited the deeply rooted need by rational people to counter nonsense with sense, as a means to whittle down these limited resources.
We’re defending against waves of shitty idiot drones with multimillion dollar missiles like this blog post. But I’m not sure what other option there is.
Yeah it's an ego project for someone with a fragile ego.
- The Dictator
From what I have read and heard, they are much better at destroying existing functional structures than building functional things.
both of these are NOT documentaries, they wildly misrepresent reality and are basically fiction
Read up on what his proposed alternative was.
Perhaps you could give a summary?
Basically he wanted the Army to do a bunch of tests we already knew the outcome of: that the munitions in question would defeat the armor. This wasn't some sort of scandal or surprise to the pentagon. No armored vehicle is invincible, and the Bradley is already as heavily armored as is practical to cross bridges without them collapsing, etc.
Burton made a ton of enemies treating this like some sort of huge scandal he was uncovering, but in reality he was distorting the situation, then used it to popularize his book.
Basically he's just a grifter, but because he was saying contrarian things a bunch of people who had no idea what was actually happening bought into his bullshit.
It's similar to what happened with the "Fighter Mafia" where the public latched onto it without understanding how utterly bullshit the contrarian proposal actually was.
The Navy stopped trying to install railguns back in 2021 but never stopped development.
I assume the lasers are future tech that sound cool, except this thing will be cancelled right after the next admin renames Dept of War back to DoD.
It's never actually been renamed. They just changed the stationery and website: https://www.usa.gov/agencies/u-s-department-of-defense.
Just like how Trump called in workers to put his name on the Kennedy Center building. Changing the name requires an act of Congress: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/76i
At least I have the new updated globe with the renamed Gulf of America. They promised to send overlay stickers once Greenland and Canada become US states.
part 1: https://www.navalgazing.net/Lasers-at-Sea-Part-1
NB/ Lasers do not cope well with smoke, fog or rain.
But they've always had a flair for ship naming - Erebus and Terror, famous for Franklin's 3rd Expedition were originally bomb ships (that is, armed with mortars instead of cannon) of the Hecla class and Vesuvius class respectively, so firstly, naming mortar armed vessel classes after volcanoes, pretty cool.
But then check out the names of Erebus' sister ships...
* Hecla
* Fury
* Meteor
* Infernal
* Aetna
* Sulphur
* Vesuvius
* Devastation
* Volcano
* Beelzebub
You'd feel pretty badass serving on the HMS Devastation.
Fun fact - HMS Erebus took part in the Battle of Baltimore, so helped inspire that line from the US national anthem about "the bombs bursting in air"
It had some potential, but that potential has been squandered, at great cost.
In commission: 15 October 2016[3]
Planned: 32
Completed: 3
Cancelled: 29
Active: 2Planned: 29 Completed: 3 Canceled: 26 Active: 3
Yet, unlike the Zumwalts, they are considered a good boat.
In some ways there's a similar situation with the F-22 vs F-35, though those two may have a bit more of a difference on roles and requirements.
https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-not...
Less humorously, the proposed Trump class "Battleship" is what a teenage armchair general would dream up. The kind of person who thinks Ministry of War sounds cool and cosplays as his favourite operator.
Well China has been building aircraft carrier mockups on train rails in the desert to test something on them while they're in motion...so I'd say unclear
Given 90s-era NATO air defences are shooting down Russia’s newest hypersonic missiles [1], I’m continuing to treat the category as more hype than utility.
[1] https://www.globaldefensecorp.com/2024/11/20/ukraines-patrio...
May. Or maybe the whole thing is just hype.
They probably do. But absent positive profiling, it doesn’t make sense to design against a hypothetical super weapon.
Anticipating the future and developing counters/mitigations is at the very core of what pentagon planners do.
Is this when they aren’t making pretty boats with pictures on the back?
Signs of excellent decision making are limited at this time.
Which with the way the US is being managed might be true, but generally there's no evidence that China has a missile which cannot be intercepted by refined means we already know.
25% interception rate on shit tier Kinzhals last year, which allegedly required salvoing all 32 interceptors from patriot battery, a patriot pac3 mse, aka the most advanced operational variant from 10 years ago. It's dropped to 6% now after RU improvement.
Math basically saying ~10 kinzhals can overwhelm typical carrier group with couple flight3 Burkes assuming all Burke VLS was dedicated to ABM, which it's not. Extrapolate to a more performant PRC hypersonic, and interception rate might approach 0. There's nothing in US missile defense tests (staged ballistic trajectories / simple decoys) that remotely suggest they have capable interceptors or the magazine depth to survive even moderate amount of high end hypersonics. Which is going to proliferate, see PRC building $100k commodity hypersonics for potential floor. Bundle that with space ISR and expeditionary navy model is even more dead in 10-15 years.
Hence IMO it's rational USnavy modernization/recapitalization is such a shit show. US legislatively locked in 11 carrier navy with all the supporting surface fleet that entails. Shit needs to be built, by law, but there's nothing competent to build in face of AShM math, so keep grafting and fucking around. It's not like USN acquisitions wasn't shit fucked before Trump.
All of US MIC acquisition behavior makes sense if one accepts that navy is probably fucked (including subsurface), the only thing US really needs for hegemony (excluding PRC containment, which US functionally can't), is 100-200 B21s (naval tacair/rip f/a-xx likely also fucked) to bomb whatever mid sized countries they want with impunity without putting surface fleet at risk (imagine Houthis with hypersonics). Any legacy naval hulls, tacair frames with some modernization will still black magic overmatch vs everyone except PRC for peacetime dick measuring. TLDR USN can't do anything against PRC, but doesn't have to do anything VS everyone else. So USN does whatever it wants, which includes a lot of flailing because it doesn't really know what to do at all.
For theatre/tactical performance, again early Kinzhal was functionally ballistic and interception rate was ~25%, dropped to 6% when RU added some terminal maneuvering. So US has not only not caught up to ABM defense outside of North Korea tier threats, ABM defense currently on trend to lose the physics race (against capable adversaries). There are fundamental physical reason high end hypersonics will likely only extend the interception gap. The TLDR is terminal speed past mach 6+, the intercept window compresses so much it becomes almost mechanically impossible for interceptors, i.e. g-load on interceptors will physically break them apart. Kinzhal (which US/PRC categorize as ballistic tier) terminal is ~mach4, PRC DFs (US categorize as proper hypersonic) are estimated to sustain mach 5-10, i.e. high machs until final seconds, basically physically impossible engagement envelopes. DEW doesn't have dwell time vs hypersonic already shielded against plasma sheath. Current golden shield bet is on glide phase interceptors, which doesn't really answer magazine math, i.e. multiple expensive interceptors (especially midcourse) is going to lose the attrition game regardless, maybe not vs smaller adversaries, but vs PRC. Extra lopsided in context of naval defense with limited magazine depth where it's not even about $$$ but inability to defend against saturation.
For PRC missiles, see tandem missile demonstration a few years ago, two missiles launched from different launch sites coordinated to hit moving ship at sea. AKA PRC already have the ISR / kill chain to hit moving ships synced to time and space. Something basically no one else has demonstrated. Now extrapolate that out 10 years, while they (and US) are proliferating spaced based C4ISR = basically any surface fleet anywhere is dead, and even if we downgrade to only static targets, that means all US logistics, i.e. unrep are dead which leaves surface fleet single deployment assets. DDG barely has enough endurance for a few days of high tempo operations (fuel and weapons), carriers has endurance but without replenishment, no ammo, and without DDG escorts no protection.
Eh the USN can still maintain superiority outside of the South China Sea which means control of global trade. It’s not like it’s useless or anything even if the Taiwan straight turns into a dead zone or if the USN has to worry about missiles from the Chinese mainland. China also has to worry about missiles hitting their mainland industrial centers and naval facilities too.
But again that doesn't mean USN can't operate permissively vs literally anyone else, even on legacy platforms that still grossly overmatches every other adversary regardless of acquisition malpractice.
Please be _appear weak when you are strong_
Please be _appear weak when you are strong_
Trump is a Russian asset and is earning his keep.
https://www.twz.com/sea/chinese-cargo-ship-packed-full-of-mo...
- oversized
- completely lacking in style
- not technically capable for the role it finds itself in!
Here's my sketch idea: Naval officers unveil the ship, but when they pull the curtains, they murmur that it's smaller than claimed (The ships will be bigger, faster and a hundred times more powerful than any previous US-built warship, according to Trump(1)). Stormy Daniels shows up and says "Oh yeah, he likes to brag, but it's more like a mushroom.".
Cut to the bridge of the ship, the navigation officer comes to the Captain and says "Sir, the ship can't navigate properly. It seems whatever coordinates we set it always wants to head to... Epstein Island!"
Then the radar officer says "Sir, we are picking up something on the radar. It's a big, it's long...". Cut to footage of a big, black, submarine. The Captain interrupts with "That must be the Obama-Class submarine! The biggest, baddest ship we've ever had!", and the crew look at it in awe.
Then Obama shows up and lectures the viewing public: "Impressive, huh? But in reality there's no Obama-class submarine. The legacy of leading the country should be measured by how it improved Americans' lives, not by the ships and ballrooms." (this message needs to be workshopped...)
Stormy Daniels reappears and says "I know which ship I'd rather be on (wink).". Then fade out the scene with the crew panickedly saying "Captain, the ship is losing power! It looks like it's falling asleep!".
(1) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/22/trump-new-na...
"Gulf of America" - absurd
"Tariffs will reduce inflation" - absurd
"Trump Kennedy Center" - absurd
"Mexico will pay for the wall" - absurd
"Ukraine started the war" - absurd
"We'll make drugs 1500% cheaper" - absurd
---
Why does MAGA love absurdity so much?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_or_misleading_statements...
Moreover though, it's another facet of the show of the White House occupant embellishing their ego and playing the reality star part through random, aspirational concepts of a plan.
PS: I dislike almost all Republicans and most Democrats, especially all of the ones who take bribes from corporations and foreign governments, so this isn't a political message but a reality statement.
As opposed to the corrupt King who loves to pardon corrupt politicians, no matter their stripe.
https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...
A destroyer planned since 2021, hopefully it won't be another Ticonderoga class fuck up.
Red Sea shows that ships need more defenses now that anyone can build anti-ship missiles and drones. Maybe they should have called Constellation light destroyer and DDG(X) a cruiser.
https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/436695...
> The new Trump-class battleships will replace the Navy's previous plans to develop a new class of destroyer, the DDG(X).
The Navy is gonna slow role this thing till he's out of office then reform the plan. Which is insanely annoying to me as a tax payer as we've basically had 25 years of the Navy's procurement being an absolute disaster, and now we're gonna lost another 4+ years over Trump's idiotic showboating.
So the only surprises are 1) how fast this happened, and 2) that "American titans of industry" are just power hungry rather than actually men of talent and brilliance.
Yes, but they're rarely that stupid. The world sees a man say five times that he's lowered drug prices by 400-1500%. And that was just last week. For many Europeans it's remarkable to even come across a person that stupid.
> that "American titans of industry" are just power hungry rather than actually men of talent and brilliance.
I never thought they were brilliant. I just thought they wouldn't sell themselves so cheaply or would be so easily intimidated.