Trump's proposed battleship would be a monumental folly

On Dec. 22 at Mara-Lago, President Trump — flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Navy Secretary John Phelan — announced a plan to build battleships that would be “the largest we've ever built.”

- MICHAEL HILTZIK

He said that starting with his first term, he had been asking, “Why aren't we doing battleships like we used to?” The new ships, he said, would be known as “Trump Class” vessels. Two will be built at the outset, he said, with as many as 25 ultimately deployed.

Much of the reportage in subsequent days focused on the impropriety of a president’s naming a military program after himself. But that was missing the point, big-time. To answer his question, there are several reasons the U.S. isn’t building battleships like we used to. These big and overarmed behemoths have been obsolete in warfare for many decades.

The cost of the Trump battleships — between $9 billion and $14 billion each — would easily bust the budget for Pentagon procurement. They would contradict the Navy’s existing strategic and tactical doctrines, which call for distributed firepower, not the concentration envisioned in a new battleship fleet. They would take so long to design and build that the first vessels would not be deployable until well into the 2030s.

“If we say 2032 for laying the keel of the first ship, that’s a good six years and at least one additional presidential administration for things to go wrong, and well before the program is capable of building a foundation of political support among labor and industry that might protect it from budget cutting down the line,” notes Robert Farley, an authority and blogger on military strategy.

Mark F. Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Marine veteran with years of official experience working on Defense Department funding, was rather more blunt: “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”

Trump announced his new battleships with all the hyperbole of almost every announcement he has made as president, dating back to his exaggerated claim of the size of the crowd at his first inauguration.