January 07, 2026
So Now is the Time That Everybody on the Internet Is Required to Become an Expert on Marine Engineering and Naval Force Structures.
Both above pieces of artwork by Tzoli.
Fortunately, I'm a weeb with a degree in history and a lifetime of wasted opportunities, so I'VE GOT THIS!
It seems that President Trump has announced that the U.S. Navy is going to start building BATTLESHIPS!
Also the Navy is getting frigates....in the form of Coast Guard cutters.
This has caused interest, excitement, outrage, and horror in various circles, the specific emotion seemingly depending on one's political preferences with apparently little input from strategic analysis or engineering considerations.
So: In keeping with the modesty we have come to expect from the current CinC, this group of warships will be called the Trump class.
....and the first one will be called the U.S.S. Defiant.
Ignoring for a moment that we don't name battleships for people, and that the first ship built in a class is the name of the class...and that Defiant is a name that U.S. naming protocols would indicate is for a minesweeper or coast guard cutter....what exactly are the various merits and silliness of this development.
First: the official Navy Art.
...'kaaaay.
Having the 5inch guns as wing mounts seems needlessly inefficient. However, it might be needed to free up space for more VLS cells.
It will reportedly have at least one railgun.
The inclusion of a railgun is interesting, as that program had been terminated. That it is included in a current design indicates that the railgun DOES work and its termination by the navy in 2021 was due more to the general policy of national enshitification by the Biden Administration than any technical hurdles facing the weapon. Certainly Japan, faced with an existential threat in the form of China, (and having leaders who want their country to survive and prosper) have had no problem getting one to work recently.
However, as we all know battleships are obsolete, and have been since the end of WW2. Also battleships are large armored vessels armed with large caliber naval rifles. This this is a death trap and is not even a battleship.
OK that last paragraph is a bit wrong headed.
Battleships in WW2 were effective escorts for the carriers with the added ability to stand up to any surface forces that got into range...they were not COST effective units in that role, but they were available and individually FAR more effective antiaircraft platforms that the cruisers and destroyers that were more affordable.
Being able to deal with targets that came within range was their downfall, because with an absolute maximum range of 25 miles, nothing was likely to get close to a carrier that could hit targets 400 miles away (and by the mid cold war could hit targets over 1000 miles away). So battleships largely left the fleet after ww2. Both the British and Americans toyed with the idea on new dreadnoughts immediately after WW2 that would be incorporating the lessons thereof, and the US drew up designs to convert its treaty battleships into missile ships as prototypes for large surface ships of the future. This was ultimately not done, mainly due to cost, but also because during the 'pentomic' period of U.S. tactical and strategic thought, it was believed that nuclear weapons would be used in any war and it thus, it was thought that a larger number of less capable but dispersed targets would be more survivable than fewer high capability vessels.
A postwar (1947ish) proposal to complete the incomplete U.S.S. Kentucky and Illinois as heavy AAA escorts for carriers. The 16 big guns are auto-firing 8inch guns (10-15 rds per barrel per minute) firing both fin stabilized APDS anti surface shells and a gun-launched sub-caliber radar guided missile. This was axed by both cost and the technical issues of gun-launched radar guided missile in the years before integrated circuits.
A mid to late 1950s proposal to convert the Iowa class into missile battleships, leveraging the armor to protect the magazines and the great reserve buoyancy to allow some limited degree of protection to the radar aerials. The Talos missiles were extremely hard hitting dual purpose weapons with 60-130 miles of range depending on the year of production, the Regulus 2 missiles could hit surface targets over 1000NM away with a multi-megaton warhead,
Large ships DO have advantages though. They can be more stable radar platforms, they have redundancy, space for command staff and electronics and can potentially have deep magazines and some protection.
To that end since the 1960s the navy has sought out large surface warships to reinforce the large number of smaller vessels. The most well known of these efforts was the strike cruiser project from the 1970s, which came very close to cutting metal. This would have produced a nuclear powered ship with 2x8 inch or 5 inch guns, an AEGIS combat system and a metric pantload of anti aircraft missiles as well as some Tomahawks.
Official USN art. Artist unknown.
This ran afoul of congress, which realized that the money could instead be spent on hookers and blow, and so the navy was forced to cram the AEGIS system designed for these ships into the hulls of the Spruance class destroyers. This produced a topheavy but serviceable radar picket destroyer, that was, then designated by congress as cruisers (the Ticonderoga class). While the Ticonderoga's hulls are a tad too small for their radars, their lightweight aluminum superstructures do have a lot of space for computers and command/control areas. They are still valued as command ships and have 32 more missiles than the tougher but more cramped Arliegh Burke class. They ARE very stressed hulls and at or past the end of their service lives and the navy has been looking for something along the lines of the strike cruiser they replaced since they hit the waster.
The 1990s saw the conceptualization of the arsenal ship, basically a cheap floating missile magazine for smaller, more electronically capable ships, and various designs of large surface warships in the mold of the strike cruiser.
To wit...
Both the above excerpts are from U.S. Destroyers: A Design History by Norman Friedman.
The art is by A.D. Baker the third.
These also went nowhere, and yet the navy still has requirement for a few large surface combatants to stiffen its defenses of its carriers (which may soon be partly drone carriers), as well as engage in separate surface action and continental missile defense.
So: the navy HAS a need for ships very much like what Trump is proposing. The larger size of the ships (about twice the size of the aforementioned Strike cruiser, and the size of an inter-war battleship) could just be re result of the need for VERY large radar arrays and a large number of VLS cells. The designation battleship seems perfectly appropriate given the vessels size and capability. I hold out an irrational hope that we can get away from the odious policy of naming ships after politicians and go back to the policy of naming them for states and occasionally mountains.
I would not put too much stock in the stated characteristics. A lot of this may be misinformation and some may lack data. For instance the number of VLS cells seems small for the size of the ship, especially since several smaller recent designs have more tubes, but this may hide other capabilities or refer to new, much larger cells foe the navy's big hypersonic glide weapons.
So I'm not going to opine one wat or the other on design details, because they're vague and I'm a weeb with a history degree, so my technical analysis is not likely to be helpful.
The other big announcement was the adoption of the Legend class Coiast Guard cutters as the new navy frigate. This has sparked some derision because these Coast Guard Cutters, while magnificent ships, ae armed like Coast Guard cutters.
However these are not intended to be destroyers. They are analogous to the River/Asheville class corvettes of the U.S. Canada, and Brittan in WW2. Small ships that can be built in numbers and do basic escort work. They are not heavy hitters, but they are present.
The Legend class is actually on a par with some of the worlds smaller frigates or corvettes. They come with a 57mm Bofors gun that has good AA capability and either a 21 cell point defense missile launcher or (more usually) a PHALANX CIWS gun. They can be fitted with SSMs and there is provision for a VLS nest abaft the 57mm gun. (whether this is for one or 2x8cell launchers is unclear, it appears to be one in the art, but I've heard that 2 will fit.) note that even 1 8 cell net translates to 32 ESSM anti aircraft missiles, or 8 larger missiles.
This has been proposed before, but was rejected, and the shipyard is still marketing the design internationally.
This is an austere design to be sure but it has been built in U.S. yards successfully, it can be built quickly and it can be built in decent numbers. That the VLS tubes will not be installed on the first few, is worrying but being fitted for but not with is not unheard of and furthermore it indicative of a desire to get hulls into the water ASAP, before the winds of power shift and procurement goes back to acquiring mainly hookers and blow.
So the takeaway is that the Navy might be getting both a surface combatant that it has been trying to get, for decades, and it might be getting a frigate that can be built in some numbers.
This weeb with a history degree is cautiously optimistic.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
12:31 PM
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