“Damn The Defiant!”
If they’re taking requests, Warhammer style chain swords please.
Apparently this navy guy thinks it is a great idea to make the Trump battleship:
The new Trump-class battleship is needed due to limitations the Navy has found with what it could outfit its destroyers with, requiring the service to find a larger hull size, according to by the service’s top surface warfare officer.
Speaking Tuesday at the WEST 2026 conference in San Diego, Vice Adm. Brendan McLane said that the service’s flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which is equipped with the Aegis Baseline 10 Combat System, is “maxed out” and that “there’s nothing else we can put on that ship.”
Well, he’s half right.
The Navy has been trying to build somewhat larger ships than Burkes for decades now, but can’t seem to hire a competent designer or builder to do it. And for their part, USN can’t seem to decide what they want to put on the ship or what they want to use it for. So after much indecision, design changes, and general delay and stupidity while running up the bill, the project gets cancelled only to be restarted in new guise a year later.*
Where this guy is clearly a trump toady is in saying the wacky ideas comprising trump’s battleship have any use whatever.
IOW: Bigger boat = Duh as in obvious. All else trumply = duh as in stupid.
*USAF’s airlifter procurement and the Army’s helo procurement efforts suffer from the same recurring problems, so I don’t mean to call out USN here for especial scorn. Most of DoD is bad at this. As is most of the industrial side of the military-industrial complex.
I honestly believe there is deep corruption here that makes this happen. These guys get kickbacks or junkets or their kid gets into Harvard or who knows what. It’s not a new thing in any military. With this much money on the line I have little doubt companies are skirting the edges of bribery and there may be overt bribery.
This is like my native, landlocked Zimbabwe launching a navy. We have a lake, but that is patrolled by police speed boats.
USA surely can do better than a "third world shithole’, right? Right?
No.
We’re just as much fuck-ups. We just do it at a larger scale. And with lots more noise.
Kinda like the proverbial difference between mice mating and elephants mating.
as I’m sure LSL can attest to, military procurement/quality control people leave service to join same companies as lobbyists, consultants etc.
Seems like these smaller warships probably won’t be the answer.
Here’s why the USN not being able to get its act together to come up with a design to replace small and medium sized warships without the program being canceled, production runs ended early and/or the designs being bad is so problematic. The USN could afford a problematic design or two, or even three in a row with the fleet left over from the Cold War. It cannot continue to afford to fuck up any longer, it is now leaning very heavily on an almost half century old design in the Arleigh Burke that is overkill for a lot of the roles it is forced to undertake because of the lack of a successful smaller replacement. TFG’s insistence on wasting time, resources and taxpayer’s dollars on his narcissistic TFG-brand battleship is only making the problem even worse. The stated intention to replace the failed 2 ship order for Constellation class frigates with a modified Coast Guard cutter in the FF(X) program is probably going to end as badly as the Constellation (cancelled after the first few are ordered) or the LCS (they’re going to be built, but be failures that need to be retired early - the ‘modular nature’ of its loadout should be sounding alarm bells since it’s a big part of the LCS’s failure).
But here’s the bigger issue: US shipbuilding capacity is going into the crapper and has been for a long time because of all of these failures. This is why South Korea is offering to build Arleigh Burkes in its shipyards for the USN because the US doesn’t have the shipbuilding capacity to keep pace with demand.
You might think that hey, why surely these shipbuilding skills are being retained in the US by the merchant shipbuilding industry, right?
Ranked: The Countries That Dominate Global Shipbuilding
Yeah, about that. You might not be surprised that the US is no longer a dominant producer of merchant shipping. It might shock you just how far down the list the US is. Numerically we’re in 14th place. Doesn’t sound that bad, right? At least until you look at gross tonnage produced and % of the world market. The US produced 64,809 gross tons in 2023, with 0.1% of the world merchant shipping production. We barely managed to edge out Iran’s 64,760 gross tons.