Sink the Battleship (Program)

One of the principles of the MAGA movement has been a disdain for “experts.” The most obvious example is that experts of all stripes, from neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists to restrainers and non-interventionists, warned President Donald Trump, mostly through the media, that if he went to war with Iran, he could expect that the regime, threatened with extinction, would pull out all the stops to threaten traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and attack vulnerable U.S. allies in the region. Now, Trump is faced with a war that will probably end up with a stronger Iran, which can threaten the Strait in the future and will likely keep enriching uranium with the possibility of getting a nuclear weapon. Thus, there is probably too much water through the Strait for Trump to start listening to experts on the Iran war, but he could still listen to historians and enlightened naval analysts on his misguided Trump-class battleship program, which is the naval equivalent of the new White House ballroom.

The last battleship the United States had in service was the famous USS Missouri, on which the Japanese surrendered at the end of World War II. The vessel was decommissioned in 1992 and for good reason. President Ronald Reagan, as part of his arbitrary and ultimately unfulfilled goal to have a 600-ship Navy, had brought back from mothballs, modernized, and recommissioned four Iowa-class battleships—the USS New Jersey at the end of 1982, the USS Iowa in 1984, the USS Missouri in 1986, and the USS Wisconsin in 1988.

All four were quickly decommissioned in 1991 and 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ships turned out to be costly to operate and maintain and had only the limited role of being offshore floating artillery batteries—for example, firing their 16-inch guns to support U.S forces ashore in Lebanon in the early 1980s and doing the same in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, along with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Before aircraft carriers, battleships, as the largest surface combatant ships, were considered the capital ships of the Navy. Yet the vulnerability of such surface ships to air and submarine attack began in World War II, continued through the British-Argentine Falklands War of 1982, and down to the current Ukraine-Russia War. In the latter conflict, Ukraine, a nation without a navy, has damaged or destroyed Russian surface ships with attacks by homemade missiles and inexpensive aerial, surface, and underwater drones, including the flagship of the Russian Navy, and backed Russian vessels away from the Black Sea coast far enough to allow Ukraine’s vital shipping lanes to be reopened.

Some naval analysts have long believed that even aircraft carriers, with all their ship escorts and air power, could be very vulnerable to attack-drones, cruise missiles, more accurate ballistic missiles, and submarines. The U.S Navy, although pushing back on this narrative, sorta votes with its feet (or fins) and, in the current situation with Iran, has kept U.S aircraft carriers out of the confined waters of the Persian Gulf.

The U.S Navy, not so long ago, decided to build more agile, smaller ships called littoral combat ships. Now with a commander in chief, who tends to like “big, beautiful” things, the Navy has turned on its heel to give us a plan to build 15 of these huge, expensive (starting at a eye-watering $17 billion projected cost per battleship, but with the usual cost overruns could be much higher), and vulnerable vanity projects under its “Golden Fleet” naval expansion. And if that isn’t enough, Adm. Daryl Caudle, the Chief of Naval Operations, recently announced during congressional testimony that the new battleships would use the same nuclear power plant as the newest carrier, the Gerald R. Ford. The Navy’s FY2027 thirty-year shipbuilding plan says that the nuclear-powered battleship will provide “longer endurance, higher speed, and accommodate advanced weapon systems required for modern warfare.” Yet historians would tell you that the Navy decommissioned nine nuclear-powered cruisers (CGNs) from 1993 to 1999 because of the high operating, maintenance, and refueling costs of nuclear reactors versus using conventional power.

Also, in addition to the huge costs of nuclear power on ships, in any nuclear-powered carrier strike group or nuclear-powered battleship-led surface action group, all the other ships guarding the big ships are conventionally powered and cannot go as fast or endure as long as those they are guarding. So those groups all need to operate within the constraints of their smaller guardians.

In sum, spending huge sums to build even bigger and likely more vulnerable surface ships, in the age of cheap killer aerial, surface, and underwater drones seems like a bad idea. On land in the Ukraine-Russia War, expensive traditional tanks and infantry fighting vehicles have proven vulnerable to inexpensive drones. And at sea, Ukrainian drones attacking from the air, from the surface, or from undersea have damaged or sunk a sizeable number of Russian surface vessels.

At a time when the Navy should be putting more manned and unmanned vessels under the waves because of the continued vulnerability of surface ships, we should wave goodbye to the vanity battleship program after giving it a “Golden Fleece” award.