Return of the Battleship!

I gotta say, this guy is starting to make sense.

All complete nonsense of course. But if you do want a 21st century battleship…

President Donald Trump seems to like big, “bold” ideas. Throw nukes around? Sure. Rip up the deck of an aircraft carrier to install the “goddamned steam?” Okay, fine. But what if we brought back one of the biggest military statements America has ever had—what if we brought back the battleship?

It’s not that the current American capital ship, the aircraft carrier, is obsolete. But the the Gerald R. Ford-class of aircraft carriers are remarkably, enormously expensive, and potentially vulnerable to many kinds of attack. Many of the Navy’s other surface ships exist essentially in order to support and defend the carrier, making a carrier battle group a huge investment of national treasure.

What if another kind of ship could take on some of that load?

The U.S. stopped building battleships in the 1940s. Aircraft, submarines, and missiles, able to strike more securely and at greater distance than the guns of a battleship, rendered the type obsolete. Nevertheless, over the years various analysts have proposed a new, large surface combatant that would play some of the same roles as a classic battleship.

Let’s imagine what such a ship might look like; what it needs to do, how it would fight, and how much it might cost.

With respect to the rest of Hegseth’s nonsense…

I’ll say there’s a bit of overstatement… close analysis of Ukrainian military performance does indicate that there can be payoffs to young, healthy, strong bodies over beardy old men; there are combat-oriented tasks that a 25 year old body can perform consistently that a 45 year old body cannot, especially with regard to offensive employment of infantry. This is also why 25 year old bodies are extremely common in professional sports and 45 year old bodies are extremely rare. That said, the Ukraine War certainly demonstrates that there are enough different jobs to be done on the battlefield that a focus on physical fitness for the entire force is myopic at best.