Key Points
Trump’s battleship plan clashes with decades of U.S. naval strategy and technology shifts
Experts described it as a “prestige project,” a “bomb magnet” and said that “this ship will never sail.”
Even if it were technically feasible, the cost of building the battleship would be prohibitive.
Lmao the lazerpig, animarchy et al roundtable have been having a field day with this.
r/NoncredibleDefense too
Meanwhile, our Navy’s skeleton crews have a tough enough time simply avoiding ramming tankers. Maintenance is also suffering, and since we have the largest fleet on Earth, it all seems rather pointless.
The money would be better spent on our existing fleet, I think.
The very first thought that popped into my head when I heard about this was that Trump is so stupid he doesn’t even realize that we haven’t actively used battleships in our naval doctrine since the end of World War 2. Aircraft carriers will always be more versatile, have longer range, and cast a larger sphere of influence than a battleship of any size ever will.
So this is little more than a glorified pet project to stroke Trump’s fragile ego, set to the tune of multiple billions of dollars in R&D and private contracts to his wealthy friends, for a project that will unlikely be done before he leaves office or leaves this mortal coil, whichever comes first.
I expect that if we end this madness and get a Democrat in office, if they have any good sense at all, they’ll cancel the project. However, the damage will be done between now and the next three years. Taxpayer money will be shoveled into this pit and evaporate into the ether.
I’ll be honest, I doubt any real money is being dumped into this.
More and more, things like this come across as people giving Trump nonsense toys to play with to feel bigly important and distract him as he gets more and more infirm. If any money actually moves towards this, it’ll be actually diverting into someone’s pocket along the way.
It struck me the most when he made the announcement of a new class of Jumbo Jet and he was literally sitting there at his desk like a kid playing with a lego airplane model.
He is increasingly a addled child that they keep distracted with stupid shit like this so that they can get work done without him fucking it up for them by opening his idiot mouth. (like admitting that Venuzuela was about oil…for example)
Vasa (previously Wasa) (Swedish pronunciation: [²vɑːsa] ⓘ) is a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship sank after sailing roughly 1,300 m (1,400 yd) into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628.
[…]
The ship was built on the orders of the King of Sweden Gustavus Adolphus as part of the military expansion he initiated in a war with Poland-Lithuania (1621–1629). It was constructed at the navy yard in Stockholm under a contract with private entrepreneurs in 1626–1627 and armed primarily with bronze cannons cast in Stockholm specifically for the ship. Richly decorated as a symbol of the king’s ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the world. However, Vasa was dangerously unstable, with too much weight in the upper structure of the hull. Despite this lack of stability, she was ordered to sea and sank only a few minutes after encountering a wind stronger than a breeze.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
fuktig mejmej
This is all I can think about.
You know this is fake because the ship isn’t pure gold
In other words: the idea of a battleship is as outdated as the idiot in the White House who had it.
The obsession with a Navy that can fight three different wars on opposite sides of the planet is outdated and the product of paranoid, reactionary, imperialist foreign policy.
Our biggest trading partners are increasingly our biggest geopolitical rivals. At some point, we either need to reconcile these contradictions or surrender intentional trade as a possibility into the next century
the true enemy of all conservatives
He really is Hitler brained.
Poor guy wants to see his name on everything and the biggest boat with biggest guns would be his favorite.
Goddamn his parents should have taken him to a psych hospital
Now we just have to get him in a bunker with nowhere else to go
And make memes with funny subtitles.
Rule of law in this land now: “Trump-class” anything is coded for “kickback-funneling-class” - it’s never going to exist for it’s stated mission, only for the explicit mission of funneling money around.
Hey, it’s just like Russian military projects!
Amazing isn’t it? Trump is the epitome of failure, but only at the mercy of other people. You gotta hand it to the piece of shit, he is an incredible grifter. He’s managed to convince an entire Top Three nation to let him do whatever the fuck he wants. He’s getting away with unspeakable crimes; pedophilia, rape, possibly murder… etc. The world’s worst human being running freely, in the most powerful position in the world, and a cult of personality. Just amazingly terrible.
Yup, same as it’s always been. I find solace in his big mad though:
- Wants to be beloved by all Americans; will never be loved by even half of Americans.
- Desperately wants to preserve his legacy; there is no future where his legacy isn’t tarnished.
- Craves being the richest, most successful ‘business’ man in the world; every business launched ended in failure or prosecution.
- Tries to project emotional strength and fortitudinous; late-night comedians live rent free in what’s left of his brain.
America is never recovering from this shit show.
The USA, since Covid:
… we’re all just still living in the post-covid collapse, mental/physical/economic breakdown.
Very likely not quite, yeah. But honestly that’s ok. The US was too important. We need a little less responsibility and a little less pull. We need a little humble dealt to us.
Imagine thinking of the US’s interference globally as responsibility
It’s going to take, minimum, 10 years to build, right? And that’s not counting any design, planning, and other ships that may be in progress at our shipyards. He’s never going to see it. So let’s just tell him we’re building it, and not.
But he drew a picture himself on the back of a napkin, can’t they use that? They surely don’t need EXPERTS to design it, Trump’s an expert, no-one knows more about ships than him.
Honestly, if I was some admiral trying to protect a bunch of R&D projects in development from Trump, I’d probably wrap as many of them as I could into a pitch for a big battleship with his name on it then spend the entire budget on the technologies that are supposedly going into the ship. Put basically no effort into the ship itself, just show him concept art and maybe send him a model or something to make him think progress is being made.
What do ya reckon they are doing
That is what they’re going to do … but in the meantime they’ll send a shit ton of money his way for the project.
If it does get made I hope it sinks faster than the Vasa
I immediately thought of Vasa as well. I thought it was ridiculous for it to happen back then, but it’s hilarious watching it happen in our time.
Or the Kang Kon.
Like, the navy hasn’t used battleships in decades because they are obsolete to deystroyers, that kind of obstacle?
really what we need are destroyer sized drone platforms anyways.
With future weaponry they might see a come back
These extremely high powered laser weapons need large battery banks which seem to be usable as a power source for railguns too. Big boats might make sense, and with laser weapons mostly obsoleting air attacks they’d be a lot less of a sitting duck
You know Iran has AI torpedo drones, right? They’re called Valfajr torpedos.
And more exotic ideas:
Anyone actually paying attention to Iran will tell you that “bigger is better” Trump ideas are just giant floating “sink me” signs compared to fast, easy to produce swarms of smart explosives.
Yeah the next generation of serious combat will probably be significantly influenced by who has the best underwater capabilities, unless someone builds some kind of flying fortress for laser attacks and air denial
Personally, I think a “battleship” designed solely for coastal bombardment duties would be the best fit for a modernized version. A Siege Ship, I guess? Provided the artillery shells are cheap, they can be constantly lobbed with great range and power at stationary targets. This would free up expensive missiles and aircraft for tasks beyond the reach or accuracy of the artillery.
How could a large incredibly expensive slow moving warship that’s really easy to locate and follow possibly be a bad idea? It’s not like you can quickly, cheaply, and easily cram a bunch of explosives in a few unnamed submersibles and sink those ships for a fraction of the cost, right?
Remember the
AlamoYamato!Okay but what does a really good space anime have to do with Trump’s delusions?
Wait actually I can kind of see it.
In case you’re not kidding, it was a real battleship - practically useless due to it’s size and cost, it only fired it’s main guns in one engagement (and it’s only arguable that they did anything) and spent the rest of the war as a command ship or scuttling between ports attempting to hide from enemy aircraft. It was ultimately sunk on it’s way to a suicide mission by allied bombers.
I knew there was a real ship but I had no idea how useless it actually was.
Better yet, there were two ships in the class. Yamato’s sister ship, Musashi suffered a very similar fate, though.
Even better still, the IJN had plans drawn up for a Super-Yamato class, but the war ended before it could be built.
It’s ironic that the Japanese had successfully proved the effectiveness of aircraft carriers in the opening of the war with the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor, but failed to carry that through to the end and instead hid behind the old way of having the thickest armor and largest guns.
The Japanese attempt to win the war against the USA failed on day one. They gambled everything on sinking the bulk of the U.S. carrier fleet which, to the Japanese’s great dismay, was not even in Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941. When Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku heard of this, he said “we have awoken a sleeping giant.”
If they had taken out the U.S. carriers that day, the Kido Butai would have been the dominant naval force in the Asia-Pacific region. With their powerful carriers, nobody could have stood up to them. And maybe the IJN’s super battleships would have had their day in the sun, after all.
