From The Washington Post:
The Trump-class battleships are a waste of time and money
The firing of Navy Secretary John Phelan reflects Pentagon tensions.
Yet at least part of the reason why Phelan was fired last week, according to news reports, was because Trump had given him an impossible and unnecessary assignment to build a new “Trump-class” battleship, the centerpiece of what Trump calls a “golden fleet,” before he leaves office in 2029. (Fox News reported that another reason Phelan was ousted was his refusal to ignore a federal judge’s ruling that it would be unconstitutional to punish Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), a retired Navy captain, for making a video reminding military personnel not to obey illegal orders.)
Trump announced the battleship’s development in December. He said that he had been inspired by the 1950s television documentary series “Victory at Sea,” which featured U.S. battleships in World War II. Trump promised that his new ships would be “beautiful” and “the fastest, the biggest and by far — 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.”
The Defense Department’s record-setting $1.5 trillion budget request for fiscal 2027 includes more than $1.8 billion for the battleships. That’s a mere down payment for vessels projected to cost as much as $17 billion each. Even assuming no cost overruns, that would make them more expensive than the Ford-class aircraft carrier or any other warships ever built.
Yet there is a good reason why the Navy hasn’t built a battleship since 1944: These massive surface vessels were already an anachronism in the days of propeller-driven airplanes and dumb bombs. They are all the more outdated at a time when they would be easily detected by satellite surveillance and become a fat target for drones, submarines, jet aircraft and all kinds of missiles.
Ukraine has already shown what sea drones can do in sinking or damaging much of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Meanwhile, Iran, armed with its own drones, speedboats and missiles, has closed the Strait of Hormuz to the U.S. Navy. (The Navy has to enforce its blockade of Iranian shipping from outside the strait in the Gulf of Oman and beyond.) It’s hard to imagine what role the Trump-class battleships could possibly have in a war against an even more sophisticated adversary like China. In fact, the Navy itself isn’t sure. The War Zone website notes: “The Navy is … still fleshing out how it plans to employ the Trump class battleships operationally.”
The Navy is also trying to figure out what armaments these behemoths would carry. Plans call for arming them with electromagnetic railguns, laser-directed energy weapons, and hypersonic missiles — all of which are still in the development phase.
Yet somehow this hypothetical warship with nonexistent weapons is supposed to start construction in fiscal 2028, notwithstanding the pathetic state of the U.S. shipbuilding industry. (More than 80 percentof U.S. warships currently under construction are behind schedule.) It’s hard not to feel a smidgen of sympathy for John Phelan — seemingly fired for not doing the impossible.
The Defense Department’s wasteful investment in the Trump-class battleship raises a bigger question about its gargantuan spending request: How much of the funding is really necessary?
The Pentagon is also asking for more than $17 billion for another Trump favorite: the Golden Dome missile-defense system. Last year, Trump outlined an insanely ambitious objective of building an effective defense against missile attack for the entire United States before he leaves office. Not surprisingly, the project hasn’t gotten very far, despite billions already spent, because it isn’t technically feasible.
There is also the issue of how much waste and corruption is buried in the defense budget. In all likelihood, even more than usual. The president’s son Eric Trump bragged last week that a company he invested in just received a $24 million Pentagon investment to build humanoid robots.
It’s unfortunate that the administration is misallocating so many defense resources because U.S. defense needs are urgent — and deserve more funding, if not necessarily 50 percent more.
Trump’s reckless war with Iran has forced the Pentagon to burn through its stockpiles of sophisticated missiles. To take but one example, the military has fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it buys annually. Revving up production lines for advanced missiles will be expensive but necessary. So, too, it’s imperative to expand spending on drones and anti-drone defenses.
And it isn’t as if the U.S. can’t afford it. Although, in absolute terms, the planned spending would be the largest defense budget ever (bigger, in inflation-adjusted terms, than in 1945), it would still constitute 4.6 percent of gross domestic product, less than the U.S. routinely spent during the Cold War.
Still, despite the obvious defense needs, it’s easy to question whether the administration’s priorities make sense.
Is it right to spend so much on defense while slashing spending on scientific research, which is integral to the nation’s economic and military competitiveness, and adding to the growing mountain of public debt? And, within the defense budget, does it make sense to allocate funds to Trump’s pet projects — and big-ticket, manned platforms such as the B-21 bomber and F-47 fighter that have lobbying muscle behind them — as opposed to the (mostly unmanned) systems that the nation needs in the age of drone warfare?
Congress should stop deferring to Trump and start doing its job by taking a hard look at the Pentagon’s budget request. If it does, the first things lawmakers ought to slash would be the Trump-class battleship and the Golden Dome. The defense budget should be tailored to the nation’s security needs, not to the president’s insatiable ego.
What readers are saying
The conversation explores a wide range of criticisms and concerns regarding the idea of developing new battleships, as proposed by Trump. Participants in this discussion highlight the obsolescence of battleships in modern warfare, emphasizing that they are outdated and vulnerable... Show more
This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.
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