No, it's not

This week has seen the announcement by the Trump Administration that they are going to be building "battleships", a subject that is well within my beat, so I figured I would take the time to start by saying that these are nothing of the sort. Defining the battleship is slightly tricky, but the best version I have is that it is a large, gun-armed armored warship. This proposal is certainly large, but it doesn't really classify as gun-armed, in that the guns are clearly secondary weapons, and there's been no discussion of armor at all. So whatever these are, they aren't battleships. Their closest cousin in the Soviet Kirov class, which likewise are somewhat hard to classify, but in the finest tradition of the USN, I'm going to go with "Large Missile Cruiser" for these. But the fact that they're being called by the wrong name, while personally extremely annoying, is just the tip of the iceberg.

First, a look at the announced specs, as given above. The dimensions are somewhat large given the displacement, as they're a pretty close match for Iowa, which is 50%+ heavier at full load, although they're also not too far from the Alaskas, of roughly the same displacement. The length might make sense if they were going for nuclear power, because a very long hull would minimize power requirements, but it seems that it's IEP instead. But then we get to armament, and things get weird. It starts with the new ship-launched nuclear cruise missile that Trump has been pushing since his first term. This is basically a replacement for the nuclear Tomahawk, and whatever the logic for or against such a program might be, there's the problem that I'm pretty sure there's no need to have this new "battleship" to use the missile. Details on the missile are very sketchy, but given that the base program is targeted at submarines, it probably can just go in the VLS with everything else. If it can't that's a requirements problem, and we should change those instead of spending money on this thing. I'm sure the crews will love it, too, given the need to guard the VLS all the time to avoid letting anyone know if there are actually nukes aboard.

Second, there are cells for Conventional Prompt Strike, which is the current hypersonic weapon that they're pushing. It's not in service yet, and I'm skeptical how much real value it will deliver. I'm also not entirely sure how many missiles will actually be aboard. Zumwalt recently got four tubes in place of her forward gun, each of which carries three missiles, and I could see either four tubes/12 missiles or 12 tubes/36 missiles, with the latter maybe making more sense given the size of the ship. The graphic provided by the Navy (below) is curiously unhelpful about this, almost like it was put together by someone who doesn't understand any of this stuff.

Then there's 128 cells of VLS, which is obviously the main armament of any surface warship in this day and age. Now, this is almost exactly the same number of VLS cells carried by a Ticonderoga class cruiser on 10,000 tons,¹ which raises a fair number of questions about the efficiency of the design relative to a slightly stretched Burke or any number of proposed designs that would be half the size of this thing.

The secondary armament is even worse. It starts with a railgun, which has become one of the perennial "next generation" weapons that never seems to get anywhere. I remember reading about how cool they were going to be almost 20 years ago, and over the last few years, the program seems to have been basically cancelled. The problem is that if you make an electrical explosion, it's sort of hard to stop it from eroding the rails, and nobody has been able to get a "barrel life" long enough to justify sticking it on a ship, even after investigating some rather amusing systems to change the rails in the field. The 5" guns are fine, although putting them both forward is a bit odd, and I'm a big fan of lasers. The tertiary armament is even weirder. RAM makes sense as a backup for something like this, but the number of 30 mm guns is a bit odd given that they're basically for shooting and drones and small boats, and you already have lasers for that. But better safe than sorry. Then there's ODIN, which is a laser-based dazzler system. And I'm sorry, but if you are going to put more lasers on, why not put on more full-size lasers? They can also dazzle things you don't want to shoot down. ODIN was developed for cases where you didn't have the power or (probably) integration to want a full-powered laser, but that isn't a problem here. And then you have nebulous "counter UxS systems", which certainly hit current buzzwords, but otherwise leave us with no idea what they do.

But look how pretty it is! That's what matters, right?

On the whole, it's pretty clearly a grab-bag of stuff that sounded cool, thrown together without any real attempt to explain how is this better spending an equivalent amount of money on Burkes or on the DDG(X) program, which was going to come in around 15,000 tons, and which this is allegedly supposed to replace. Apparently, a lot of this is driven because Trump thinks that modern ships are ugly, and should look good. And I'm not entirely in disagreement with him on that. I love a beautiful ship as much as anyone, but I also strive to keep my aesthetic judgements separate from my policy judgements. I also think that there's some value in having good-looking ships when you're doing port visits and the like, and have even toyed with a "cheap capital ship" to be able to gain some of the benefits I discussed for the Iowas in the 1980s. But that would not have been billed as the future of the Navy, more an interesting side project, and I'm far from sure it would actually be a good use of our limited defense budget.

We've seen a similarly casual approach to procurement policy with the replacement for Constellation. SecNav Phelan has announced that it will be a minimum-change version of the National Security Cutter design, with a flexible mission module slot added on and maybe RAM, in hopes of getting in the water more quickly. Now, they might actually be able to make "getting a ship launched by 2028" on this one, particularly if they're able to reuse components from the cutter Friedman (WMSL-760), which was cancelled back in July, with an unclear amount of work already done. But the result will be something more much like the "minimum viable warship"/Type 31 than a true multi-role frigate, and we should be careful not to confuse the two. In particular, even if the mission module slots get filled with VLS carrying, say, ESSM, the ship does not have the sort of radar necessary to be considered a serious air defense asset on the modern battlefield. I gamed this out in Command: Modern Operations, which doubles as a mid-grade military simulation tool. Both the new ship, apparently designated FF(X) and FFG-62 handled a salvo of 8 conventional C-802-type sea-skimming missiles without too much trouble. But then I upped the threat to NSM and things changed radically. FFG-62 picked them up at 18.5 nm, just inside the radar horizon, and began firing at about 15 nm, with none of the missiles getting closer than 9.3 nm. The NSC-based design, with its much worse radar, didn't pick them up until 3.7 nm, when it was too late to do anything other than a single RAM and a few ineffective shots from Phalanx and the 57 mm gun. NSC also has no onboard sonar system, although one based on the LCS version might be adaptable for use from the mission deck, at an obvious cost in air defense capability. But it's "An American Design from an American Shipyard", so we're going to build it anyway, instead of more Constellations.

I am also bothered by the name. Not Defiant, which is a fine name for a warship, even if lacking in any particular heritage in the USN. But calling the ships the Trump class is... Look, I've been banging on about this for some time, and naming things after someone who is not only alive but in office is just gross. Also, a complete misunderstanding of how class names work in the American tradition. The British sometimes will pick a theme name, but we just take the first-ordered ship of the class,² and use that. So even if this does end up getting into the water, it will probably be as the Defiant class. And I'm not hopeful for that happening. This is pretty clearly a very early design, intended to cater to someone whose understanding of naval matters comes entirely from vague memories of Victory at Sea³ and various yachts. It's going to take years to turn it into something we can build, and its fate past 2028 is going to depend on whoever ends up winning that election, a subject I'm not competent to speculate on.

The design is also pushing the limits of "steel is cheap and air is free", a doctrine I am usually a fierce partisan of. I think that view is pretty straightforwardly true when you're talking about putting 4,000 tons of combat systems in a 6,000 ton hull. But at some point, other factors start to take over. There's a least a little bit of wisdom in the Type 42 view that if you have extra space, people will try to install stuff in it. I was also worried about drydocking, but apparently, pretty much every drydock we have that supports DDGs also can handle LHDs, which are about the same size as this thing. More importantly, even if this ship was considerably more capable than DDG(X), which it mostly isn't, it can only be in one place at a time, and we have a lot of commitments. A ship in the wrong place isn't all that much better than no ship at all, so there are reasons to want numbers.

Shas'ui made an excellent summary of the program on the Naval Gazing Discord

Ultimately, this entire thing is silly. This is a ludicrously overgrown destroyer/cruiser (so far as those are separate things these days) without even a figleaf of justification for its size. And even if there was some justification for the size, it definitely isn't a battleship. Also, on a personal note, I would really appreciate it if the Administration stopped dropping significant naval news on the weeks of major holidays, because it adds something to my plate that I would rather not have to deal with.