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The White House has announced plans to bring back the battleship. I have a couple of immediate thoughts to be followed by the more interesting questions.
One, the main military mission this ship is designed for is to maintain, support, and protect Trump's ego. Let's stipulate that from the outset: whatever else is going on, this is Donald Trump putting his name on something big and flashy. That said, that's largely irrelevant. If the ship is good and necessary, I don't mind Trump's name on it any more than I would excuse it if it's a boondoggle.
Two, I'll believe it when I see it. As it turns out, there's a lot that goes into designing and producing warships. Just because we say we're doing it now doesn't mean it's going to happen anytime soon. And even if this is the priority, we'll see what it looks like in three years' time.
Three, rail guns. Cool. Are they at a state where deploying them makes any kind of sense? Or is this Trump attempting to Reaganize China into submission? Would be cool, but I doubt it'd work twice.
Four, does a battleship even make sense these days? I thought World War II was the last hurrah for the things, that the trend ever since has been bent toward stronger and deadlier weapons. In that environment it doesn't make sense to build big because it concentrates resources in a large target. But that leads to other questions because at the end of the day I'm not positive about that assessment.
I know very little about the realities of naval warfare, of the current ships, threats, and missions. So please educate me. Forgetting Trump's ego, forgetting the procurement process, would these battleships be a useful tool on the world stage? Is there a design for a battleship that would be more suited to modern warfare? And would it be more useful than building more, smaller ships?
Discussion (61)
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Much may depend on drone swarm defense tech and how that's going.
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These will likely end up being cruisers. Destroyers offer more bang for the buck. We only ever built 4 Iowa class battleships. They were awesome, but obsolete when they came down the slips.
I don't know just how ready rail guns currently are. They've promised the moon. We'll see.
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As I've learned playing Hearts you always want to shoot the moon but seldom end up doing so.
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I've seen claims that lasers at the moment provide far more boom for the buck than rail guns. My thought was that a new battleship design might be able to launch hundreds of drones at a time from a concealed cavity. Or, even better, reconfigure itself into a giant robot to meet the rising kaiju threat.
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When I see the swings in doctrine, strategy, tactics in only decades, between great power peer competition to coastal defense and interception, and back again, I have some pity for the planners.
We see the unaddressed threat of Godzilla and spend years straining to meet it.
And then, the press and the public are screaming, "You idiots! What have you done about the new Rodan threat, hah?
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