Donald Trump’s much-hyped new battleship fleet, named after himself, “will never sail,” a group of experts told CNBC in a new report, owing to the outdated design that will make them a “bomb magnet” in a real conflict.
Earlier this week, the president unveiled a new “Trump-class” of US Navy battleships, which he touted as “some of the most lethal surface warfare ships” and “the fastest, the biggest, and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.” Despite his enthusiasm from Trump about maintaining “American military supremacy,” CNBC on Friday noted the “glaring problem” putting them at odds with reality: “battleships have been obsolete for decades.”
“The last was built more than 80 years ago, and the U.S. Navy retired the last Iowa-class ships nearly 30 years ago,” CNBC explained. “Once symbols of naval might with their massive guns, battleships have long since been eclipsed by aircraft carriers and modern destroyers armed with long-range missiles.”
The outlet conceded that Trump’s labeling of these new ships with the outdated model name could be a “misnomer,” and the actual ships might be more in line with modern sensibilities. Speaking to several experts about the ships, however, CNBC found that the “Trump-class” fleet is still out of step with naval realities, with Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, arguing that they “would take too long to design, cost far too much and run counter to the Navy’s current strategy of distributed firepower.”
“A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water,” Cancian said, also adding that “there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail.”
Bernard Loo, senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, dismissed the ships as “more of a prestige project” than anything practical. For comparison, he cited the story of Japan’s World War II super-battleships Yamato and Musashi: heavily armed battleships that were the largest ever built. Despite their power, they were sunk by more versatile and fleet-footed aircraft launched from carrier ships before they saw significant use.
If deployed, Loo suggested that “Trump-class” battleships would meet the same “bomb magnet” fate.
“The size and the prestige value of it all make it an even more tempting target, potentially for your adversary,” he said.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, suggested that, like with many of Trump’s odd decisions, he might be operating with a reverence for symbols of power over realities, and might have a view of American naval supremacy based on the 1980s, the last time that the US recommissioned WWII-era battleships to counter the Soviet Union.
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