I know many of my readers here are older men, and older men are famous for their love of military history, so I’m asking one of you to explain it to me like I’m five: Why would we be investing in a new class of naval battleships, when naval battleships haven’t been relevant to modern warfare since the Second World War? And how many times have we been told the next war will be fought with drones and software? How do battleships play into that?
Seriously, I want to know. This makes no sense to me.
I know I’ve been scarce around here of late, and I will likely be scarce going forward. I’m writing this while watching my kitchen floor dry, and I still have a few things to do before I’m ready for the holiday. So let this be the last one for a while, unless some photos present themselves. I wish every last one of you Merry Christmas or whatever holiday you observe, including Festivus. I do not have a lot of problems with your people, because in fact, you’re the best.
Back later.
Mark P said on December 23, 2025 at 11:03 am
That was exactly my thought — battleships have been obsolete for naval warfare since WW 2. But then what Trump, in his infinite ignorance, is thinking of is not a battleship, but more like a missile cruiser or something, like the pride of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. That’s the one that a country without a navy sank in a land war. I am pretty sure that Navy planners are rolling their eyes right about now. Trump, in his infinitely infinite ignorance, said the ship will be completed in a couple of years.
As Lucy Van Pelt apocryphally says, “Christ. What an asshole.”
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David C said on December 23, 2025 at 11:16 am
Because Trump and Kegseth have the minds of 12 year olds and a not very bright ones at that. They probably saw a WWII movie and thought they looked cool. The Ukraine war has changed everything about how wars are conducted. I’m sure the brass knows it. The civilians, not so much. I work in defense industry building military trucks. I was talking to my supervisor last week and we were talking about seeing all the Russian trucks and tanks that Ukraine has blown up using cheap drones. I kinda feel that trucks on the front lines are obsolete. We need to be asking hard questions and those two knuckleheads aren’t up to the task. I think they look at the way Russia is conducting the war and thinking they need to be doing that because marching soldiers to be slaughtered seems like the tough guy way. It’s just another example of how totally fucked we are. If the country is lucky, it’ll be unfucked before we all die. I doubt we’re going to be lucky.
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scott said on December 23, 2025 at 11:31 am
Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money will probably have a post about this eventually. It’s his expertise. Trump’s current term will be up before this gets off a drawing board. That’s before getting US shipyards out of mothballs. We could always have China build one or 27.
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Sherri said on December 23, 2025 at 11:46 am
Since Trump apparently believes that stealth planes can’t be seen with the naked eye, they should just tell him that that the new Trump class ships are even more amazing stealth technology: even the missiles can’t be seen, and the wake of the ship is hidden as well. The materials themselves are invisible, so you can’t even see it under construction unless you wear special goggles.
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tajalli said on December 23, 2025 at 12:15 pm
The Emperor’s New Battleships.
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alex said on December 23, 2025 at 12:34 pm
Like Tubby’s ballroom, it’s going to be massive and frivolously gaudy and have his name on it and that’s the only thing that matters, utility be damned.
I have a feeling that “Trump class” is going to be a new branding effort on a whole lot of ridiculous stuff that’s yet to be announced let alone even conceived. It’s a joke that’s going to follow him around long after he has croaked because he doesn’t have any class, just excruciatingly bad taste and even worse judgment, and as mentioned upthread most of this shit will never come to pass while he’s in office and surely not once he’s out of it.
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Suzanne said on December 23, 2025 at 12:44 pm
So Ben Sasse, former US GOP Senator who went on to lead the U of Florida (poorly, I believe) has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He did vote to impeach Trump after Jan 6 but as I recall, was all in on the GOP far right agenda for the most part.
https://www.twincities.com/2025/12/23/ben-sasse-pancreatic-cancer-diagnosis/
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ROGirl said on December 23, 2025 at 12:50 pm
I keep thinking about that scene in the movie “Being John Malkovich,” when John Malkovich enters into himself and everyone looks like him and says only “Malkovich.” Just replace John Malkovich with you know who.
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Jeff Borden said on December 23, 2025 at 1:00 pm
The last ship-to-ship battle was 1944 in the Leyte Gulf. Aircraft carriers destroyed the very concept of the battleship. Ronald Reagan –of course– spent hundreds of millions of dollars to refit the U.S.S. Missouri. This is all about small, insecure and unintelligent gobs looking to launch a floating penis to overcome their insecurities. Where the fuck is Congress!
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Dexter Friend said on December 23, 2025 at 1:04 pm
Dad was a WWII Navy man…me, US Army.
This morning I researched this topic. Trump was bragging his Trump fleet, each @$5B, would have ships that will dwarf any battleship or aircraft carrier in world history. Fact: half the size of the largest Iowa-class ships of WWII to the Viet Nam era. A third the length of say The Enterprise, retired at San Diego…I saw that monster, and was overwhelmed at the size. That ship is an aircraft carrier.
This means the displacement of sea water will be a third of what the Enterprise displaces.
In a world in which we hear of drone wars replacing troops with weapons in-hand, with tanks becoming only a specialized component of battle , we hear that Russia has now lost well over one million soldiers as the war there proceeds into year 4. So we ain’t there yet, into a world of diminished casualties.
Still, all sensibilities point to a fact: Trump fleet, the $5,000,000,000 per ship plan, is just a self-tribute to a narcissist…an ego-inflated baboon who is still in The White House.
For years I said Reagan was the worst President in history. Remember Grenada? The mess in Panama? The Iran-Contra disaster which Reagan said under oath he could not remember a fucking thing? OK..Trump has now surpassed Reagan in the race to the bottom. MotherFUCKER !!
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Deborah said on December 23, 2025 at 1:10 pm
The Trump regime now says that wind turbines are a national security problem because they scramble radar or something, it’s all ridiculous of course and not worth thinking about, they’ll lose in court eventually. I don’t want to look it up again because I don’t want to give them the click but it might be only off-shore turbines they’re referring to. As we know Trump hates those particularly because he doesn’t want them to end up in his view from Mar-A-Lago as they do from his golf club in Scotland.They’ll say and do anything to keep the fossil fuel folks happy.
Trump’s go to is “National Security”, anything he doesn’t like is a national security issue now and his minions bend over background so he gets his way.
Three more years of this is excruciating to contemplate. I hope they can impeach and convict him after the midterms, but probably won’t happen unfortunately.
I also read that MAGAts in Colorado are going to break Tina Peters out of prison soon.
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FDChief said on December 23, 2025 at 2:02 pm
As several commentators have already noted, 1) Felony Fats has the intellectual grasp of a 12-year old and not a bright one, and 2) he only “knows” the oddball things he picked up through his father’s weirdness or that got stuck in the magpie nest inside his head.
So…1) “big warship” = “battleship” despite these kludgy things being closer to a Moskva-type missile cruiser.
2) Like any 12-year old Fats has pasted every “cool!” thing onto this platform regardless of it’s military value: cruise missiles! Nukes! Lasers! AI!
I don’t see any real mission for this goofy thing. Or, rather, it’s armed and organized for half a dozen missions, all of which already have specialized hulls that do them better. There’s a reason the USN didn’t put out a bid for this design; they don’t need or want it.
But just like the original Nazis, the flunkies have learned how it’s safer and easier to appease the Fuhrer than try and rebut his lunatic ideas.
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