Is an overhaul equivalent to building a whole ship from the keel up? I would doubt it but I really do not know.
Philly can build it, but no, an overhaul is not the same or as tough.
The Philly Shipyard is now known as the Hanwha Philly Shipyard and is apparently the primary US yard for building Super Tankers.
It looks like San Diego’s General Dynamics NASSCO might be the only other one.
Setting aside all the nonsense in the proposed weapon specs, the actual size of the vessel ought not be that impressive. Much more modern cruiser size than pre-WWII battleship size.
All US warships are built in the USA. Could another model be built that’s not really all that different? Sure. Will it be built? Of course not.
But you can bet that when it becomes obvious this isn’t going to happen, the RW propaganda machine will be sure to tell all the RW types, MAGA or not, that it’s all the Democrat’s fault they’re not getting their shiny new battleship.
And IMO that’s really the point of a lot of trumply bloviating. To invent things for the Democrats to be blamed for later when they don’t actually happen.
I’m just surprised it’s not two weeks.
As an example, the USS Enterprise is running 3 years behind. That’s with the USS Gerald Ford working out most of the tech issues, though my understanding is the Navy added some delays for budget reasons and the defensive lasers are holding up completion to some degree.
IF they’re built, and IF they rename the first ship Trump, then maybe I’ll call them the Trump class, through gritted teeth. Until then I’ll ignore the propaganda and follow centuries of international maritime tradition by calling them the Defiant class.
I love it!
It sure does! We’ll just have to clear the slipways of carriers for a while to build them…
The Navy’s constant fuckups when it comes to designing a small surface combatant that doesn’t get cancelled or retired 15 years after being built has been hurting the nation’s military shipbuilding ability for some time now. These fantastical monstrosities Dear Leader has decided the country needs to waste time and money on to appease his ego before they never actually get built isn’t going to help things.
US shipbuilding capacity has gotten so bad that South Korea has offered to build up to 5 Burke-class destroyers a year for the USN.
The combined output of the only U.S. shipyards currently capable of building Aegis destroyers remains below the Navy’s stated requirement of at least three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers annually, as their combined output is around 1.6 to 1.8 ships per year.
Cue jokes about Damn The Defiant!
It’s an idiotic proposal. The proposed class of ship is twice the size of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer with half the firepower (magic sci-fi weapons not withstanding).
The proposed design doesn’t have thick armor or a large main gun (again, magic rail guns not withstanding) so it at best it’s really a heavy cruiser.
In fact the entire concept represents a completely outdated and obsolete naval doctrine. Battleships represent a pre-aircraft, pre-missile doctrine where “bigger was better” with respect to the main gun and armor. But what good is a 16 cannon that can obliterate a target within 20 miles (which the new battleship won’t have) when the enemy can swarm your giant ship with missiles and drones launched from over the horizon?
The last major surface kill by a battleship was likely in 1944 in the Battle of Surigao Strait during WWII, so I have to wonder what the actual mission of a giant “super-destroyer” with the same missiles and cannon as a regular destroyer.
Also, a key is that battleship-era ships relied on the fact that the impact points of any hits were going to be determined by a mix of probability and a ballistic arc, so they could use an armor scheme that by put the heaviest armor where they were more likely to be hit.
But by necessity, ships can’t armor themselves that heavily all over - some parts can’t be armored at all - so that scheme stopped working when missiles got precise enough to hit specific parts of a ship. A heavy armor belt is just dead weight when nobody is going to actually attack there. That’s an important part of why nobody has replaced old style gun-armed battleships with a missile-armed version; replacing the guns with missiles doesn’t help with the issue of size and armor not being a good protection anymore.
A related issue is that in an era of high accuracy, a single big ship is just begging to get destroyed by concentrated fire. That’s what largely sidelined battleships even before high accuracy weapons came in; “if it’s too valuable to lose, it’s too valuable to use”. The fact they were so big and expensive meant there was never more than a relatively handful of them, and also meant that destroying them would do outsized harm. So they were used very cautiously since the enemy would mob and destroy the battleships if they could, and therefore were never able to contribute as much as they could have in theory.
Read this new Atlantic article. Even aircraft carriers are in trouble:
Carrier fleets are increasing their defense though.
Missiles might be a danger now, but not in a few years. The danger remains torpedoes.
Between defensive lasers, phalanx machine guns, defensive missiles and the entire fleet designed to work as one defensive shield (Aegis), carrier fleets remain pretty safe from the air and will be much more so within 5 years. Same would be true for this dementia Battleship if actually built.
Which is why, prior to this idiocy, the Navy was moving to a paradigm of many smaller ships. Or at least, they were trying to.
Can submarines launch drones?
Are you saying they were moving away from carriers? If so I never saw that memo.
The small ship development has been plagued with issues on top of that.
The Navy is about fleets, not individual ships. The carrier fleets are power projections with only China being a real threat to them. North Korea or Russia would be easy to handle.
I hope we’re not close to having to deal with a NATO country.
The US Navy is still supreme and by a lot.
Battleships serve no purpose today but carriers still do as do the small carrier like ships we have.
I haven’t read the rest of this thread, which undoubtedly has loads of good info about the value of battleships. It caught my eye because I’ve been reading a short book, really a series of essays, called War and Power: Who Wins Wars―and Why by Phillips Payson O’Brien. His thesis is basically that the only things that matter in wars are having both technological superiority and the ability to put more good stuff in the right place at the right time, rather than soldiers per se. I think of it as the Walmart thesis. Cashiers are necessary but that’s not what made Walmart a superpower.
He spends a chapter analyzing why battleships were so sought after before WWI and again for a moment before WWII and why those moments were so brief, so futile, and so costly. Recommended to those who want a terse history without the usual battle-heavy baggage.
Obviously a set of ships someone called “bomb magnets” will never be built. I pity the poor sods in the Navy who get stuck with mocking up a design anyway. Hey, maybe they can just make some pretty pictures with AI and pass them up to Trump.
The biggest danger carriers are in is that the only slipways big enough to build them are also the only ones big enough to build these fantasy monstrosities of TFG’s in.
Carriers have always been ‘in danger’. They’re not invincible. And someone is always trying to find a new way to sink them, precisely because they are so valuable and powerful. China has already deployed the DF-21D anti-ship ICBM as an anti-carrier weapon. Which wasn’t even a new idea, the USSR played around with the idea of using ICBMs as carrier killers during the Cold War.
Big emphasis on the “trying to”. In actuality they’re still building Burke-class destroyers, which are too big to fill the ‘small ship’ role in anything but an overkill fashion. They’ve been in production for longer than any other class of ship in US Navy history. They were supposed to end production when the Zumwalt-class went into serial production, but the Zumwalt was canceled after three of 32 planned ships, and the Burke production lines were started back up. The FF(X) was supposed to replace all of the O H Perry class frigates retired after the Cold War, but it went nowhere, was replaced by the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS, better known as Little Crappy Ships) which unfortunately went into serial production before the Navy realized they were a very bad idea and started retiring them. The Constellation-class was supposed to be off-the-shelf FF(X) using the successful Italian FREMM design as the basis around which to modify. Perun’s video does the issue with its failure and cancellation after only 3 units far more justice than I could do it.
Which brings us to the narcissistic idiocy of TFG’s new ‘battleships’, and the inclusion of the boilerplate that
Attached to the ‘GoldenFleet’ page. Which is utter nonsense, as every dollar and hour spent on the Defiant (I’m never going to call them the TFG class) is time and money not being spent on developing the FF(X). Oh, and while we’re at it, the Ticonderoga class cruisers are rapidly approaching the end of their lifespans, and the CG(X) that was supposed to replace them was cancelled as well.
Oh, and that brings up the big elephant in the room. The Ticonderoga’s and the first Flight I/II Burke’s were supposed to be replaced by the DDG(X) program. Want to make any guesses what happened to that when the orange narcissist rolled out the plan for battleships that he helped design?
On December 22, 2025, the Department of Defense under Trump administration announced a Trump-class battleship. It stated as quoted that the “Trump-class battleships will replace the Navy’s previous plans to develop a new class of destroyer, the DDG(X).”
So, the Navy is going to be up shit’s creek when the last of the Ticonderoga’s is taken out of active service in 2027 and the first of the Burke’s start retiring very shortly afterwards and there is no replacement for them apart from continuing to produce more Burke’s to replace the uhh.. Burke’s. Oh, and did I mention that the US lacks the shipbuilding capacity to actually produce the required 3 Burke’s a year, and can only currently build 1.6-1.8 a year? And that it’s so bad that South Korea is offering to build up to 5 a year for the USN to make up the shortfall. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I mentioned that.
My last link in this thread is to an article by O’Brien.
The best mix of naval assets is, I fear, too much a technical operations research topic for me to fully understand the most sophisticated arguments. So to some extent I have to base my somewhat weak opinions on which expert I trust. I am highly confident that Donald Trump is completely incompetent in these matters. And I’m reasonably confident O’Brien is a legitimate expert with good motives and without financial or service loyalty bias. O’Brien could still be wrong, but it’s a lot less likely.
The war in Ukraine demonstrates to me that the next war is going to rely heavily on drones. Given that, is the US capable of mass production of drones in sufficient quantity (especially since it would need to rely on parts that don’t come from China)?