I mean the whole proposal is nothing more than some of Trump's staffers coming up with an image and a bullet list and him liking it.
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.
It probably doesn't really matter, as this thing is never going to be built. I kind of suspect everybody is just going into "ok grandpa" mode until he loses interest and starts chasing some other half baked thing.
I wish SNL was currently on the air and made a hell of a joke out of that announcement...
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!".
It's going to be the "cybertruck of the seas" is what it's going to be if it's not quietly shelved when he gets distracted by some other thing that offends him.
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.
The US navy is in freefall. The best we can do is build a 40 year old destroyer hull and an aircraft carrier class that we plan to be building for literally 100 years. Shipyards can't build anything. Every design is mismanaged so poorly and leached on by traitorous defense contractors so badly that we get essentially nothing but the bill.
We should christen it as a new class of ships: the dreadyep. With any luck, the gold encrustations will sink it when it is set afloat. Barring that, maybe some midshipman will "forget" to seal off a bilge port.
Are ships even defendable in the age of hypersonic missiles? It seems like, should a large-scale war happen again, it will look entirely different from the wars in the 20th century.
It's all hype, as the article points out. "Battleship", it's not. No mention of armor. A battleship is supposed to be able to withstand a hit from its own primary weapon.
The British Navy had a fad for light cruisers at one point, "eggshells armed with sledgehammers". They did not do well in WWI and WWII.[1] Nor did the armored battleships. No Japanese or German battleship in WWII survived a determined air attack. Yamato, Tirpiz, Bismark - all lost to air attack.
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.
> Anywhere near the coast of China, a warship is within range of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.[2] Lots of them.
Yes, which is why the DDG(X) class has loads of stealth built in, to make it harder for those missiles to lock on.
One of the most important tools for fighting missiles is... an aircraft carrier. Early warning air systems (E2 Hawkeye), interceptors (F35), mostly for blowing up scouting craft.
Missiles can only home into what they can detect and see. Blowbup their eyes (RADAR systems) and they are flying blind. It's a lot of ocean out there and the horizon is surprisingly short.
Flight is your best way to cover a lot of ocean and find an enemy, but anything flying should be taken out by an F35.
--------
I'm not so against a rail gun or any of these future weapons per se. IIRC Japan has deployed a rail gun and they are an ally, with the right R&D team / licensing we might be able to get a working design.
But you know, that depends on how well Japans Railgun works. Ditto with laser systems and whatnot: as long as we test the crap out of them it's fine to deploy.
> 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.
Moskva is barely comparable to a singular US Destroyer, let alone a cruiser or larger boat.
And USA deploys large teams of Destroyers to help watch each other (and protect the carrier at the core of their fleet).
I'd expect that a drone being launched at a US Carrier strike group would simply be gunned down by the machine guns of an F35, long before they get close to the fleet.
-----
The sinking of the Moskva is also a Russian error. We all know that the Moskva's RADAR system could see the drones. The sad truth is that the Moskva's sailors were themselves unready to watch a RADAR screen for hours, days, months. They likely got fatigue and sounded the alarm too late vs the aerial threat.
Or maybe command was not notified quickly enough. Who knows? Communication error? There's a whole slew of chain of command issues that could have happened.
But we all know that the Moskva has good enough RADAR to see all of those drones. Even in the storm they were in. So it's most likely some kind of human error along the way.
USA, and other NATO forces, have anti-fatigue measures (better software, better training). Furthermore, we run missions vs Houthis and gain battle experience, or also shoot down Iranian missiles on their way to Israel. These missions (exercises??) will keep our sailors in better shape than the awful training the Russians have.
As a non-American living across the pond, the thing that is most terrifying to me about Trump's presidency isn't his authoritarian tendencies, corruption, cruelty, or criminality. The world has seen plenty of leaders like that. Maybe not recently in so-called Western countries, but it happens. What's novel is his sheer idiocy. Calling him a moron is an insult to the intelligence of morons. And what's so terrifying about it isn't that a man so stupid was elected president of such a big and important country, although that's bad enough, but seeing American titans of industry and other members of its elite - people possessing real power - seriously discussing, or even praising, the quality of the emperor's new clothes.
Whatever this febrile dream vaporware could be, it's still way too big for modern combat. Don't take my word for it, listen to a US Navy Commander, a serious person obviously, explain how it's terrible and completely inattentive to real USN needs and doctrine. https://youtu.be/0Zqa9azGo6M
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.
>On the whole, it’s pretty clearly a grab-bag of stuff that sounded cool, thrown together without any real attempt to explain how is this better spending an equivalent amount of money on Burkes or on the DDG(X) program, which was going to come in around 15,000 tons, and which this is allegedly supposed to replace.
Yeah it's an ego project for someone with a fragile ego.
34 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 45.4 ms ] threadFrom what I have read and heard, they are much better at destroying existing functional structures than building functional things.
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.
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...
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.
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.
- The Dictator
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...
Yes, which is why the DDG(X) class has loads of stealth built in, to make it harder for those missiles to lock on.
One of the most important tools for fighting missiles is... an aircraft carrier. Early warning air systems (E2 Hawkeye), interceptors (F35), mostly for blowing up scouting craft.
Missiles can only home into what they can detect and see. Blowbup their eyes (RADAR systems) and they are flying blind. It's a lot of ocean out there and the horizon is surprisingly short.
Flight is your best way to cover a lot of ocean and find an enemy, but anything flying should be taken out by an F35.
--------
I'm not so against a rail gun or any of these future weapons per se. IIRC Japan has deployed a rail gun and they are an ally, with the right R&D team / licensing we might be able to get a working design.
But you know, that depends on how well Japans Railgun works. Ditto with laser systems and whatnot: as long as we test the crap out of them it's fine to deploy.
> 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.
Moskva is barely comparable to a singular US Destroyer, let alone a cruiser or larger boat.
And USA deploys large teams of Destroyers to help watch each other (and protect the carrier at the core of their fleet).
I'd expect that a drone being launched at a US Carrier strike group would simply be gunned down by the machine guns of an F35, long before they get close to the fleet.
-----
The sinking of the Moskva is also a Russian error. We all know that the Moskva's RADAR system could see the drones. The sad truth is that the Moskva's sailors were themselves unready to watch a RADAR screen for hours, days, months. They likely got fatigue and sounded the alarm too late vs the aerial threat.
Or maybe command was not notified quickly enough. Who knows? Communication error? There's a whole slew of chain of command issues that could have happened.
But we all know that the Moskva has good enough RADAR to see all of those drones. Even in the storm they were in. So it's most likely some kind of human error along the way.
USA, and other NATO forces, have anti-fatigue measures (better software, better training). Furthermore, we run missions vs Houthis and gain battle experience, or also shoot down Iranian missiles on their way to Israel. These missions (exercises??) will keep our sailors in better shape than the awful training the Russians have.
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.
A destroyer planned since 2021, hopefully it won't be another Ticonderoga class fuck up.
- oversized
- completely lacking in style
- not technically capable for the role it finds itself in!
Yeah it's an ego project for someone with a fragile ego.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYJ2w82WifU
https://www.twz.com/sea/chinese-cargo-ship-packed-full-of-mo...