New Battleships for Trump’s ‘Golden Fleet’

In addition to real estate, golf courses and a cultural institute, US President Trump has now also given his name to a new series of ships for the US Navy. This week he announced the construction of at least twenty “battleships” who will belong to the “Trump class” and should be part of what he called “The Golden Fleet.”

“They will be the fastest, largest, and certainly a hundred times as powerful as any battleship ever,” Trump said at the presentation at Mar-a-Lago on Monday. The ships would be more than three times as large as the destroyers from the Arleigh Burke classwhich are now the ‘workhorse’ of the Navy.

Their armament would include hypersonic missiles, electromagnetically driven guns – so-called rail guns – and high-energy laser cannons. None of these weapons are operational yet. According to Trump, two ships will initially be built. The first ship in the series should be called USS Defiant (‘challenging’). The cost of that ship is estimated at ten billion dollars.

The keel should be laid in five years; according to observers, an unfeasibly short deadline for a ship that is now only available as a ship artist’s impression consists.

Outdated

Battleships, de facto sailing ‘fortresses’ with thick armor and equipped with heavy artillery, were once the most important warships for achieving superiority at sea, but have no longer been relevant since the Second World War.

The six last American battleships, the Iowa classbuilt from 1940 onwards, were scrapped after the Second World War. Some of them were used for coastal bombardment during the Vietnam and Korean Wars, but they never took part in naval battles. Two ships were deployed in 1991 during the first Iraq war to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles. The USS Missouri last served until 1992 and is now a museum ship in Pearl Harbor.

The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 marked the end of the battleship. Japanese bombs and torpedoes not only sank four American battleships there, but immediately made it clear that the future belonged to a new weapon: the aircraft carrier, which with its fighter planes and bombers had a much greater range than the guns of a battleship.

The battleship era was coming to an end anyway. A German submarine chased the elderly British battleship HMS Royal Oak into the cellar in October 1939. British warships sank the Bismarck, pride of the German Kriegsmarine, in 1941. In turn, American bombers made short work of the Japanese battleship Yamato, the largest in the world, in 1945.

Naval drones

Battleships were cumbersome, extremely expensive, and required enormous crews. And although they were partly protected by their armor on the flanks, they proved vulnerable to torpedoes and dive bombers. This also increasingly applies to the aircraft carriers on which the US has deployed since then. The sinking of Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea by Ukrainian naval drones and missiles underlines the same.

The USS Defiant will be a source of pride for every American

According to several commentators, the Trump class is the wrong response to the military challenges facing the US, especially the threat from China. According to Admiral Mark Montgomery, former director of operations for the US Navy in the Pacific, the Navy needs “a large number of smaller ships with minimal crews and lots of ammunition.” he countered The New York Times.

Michael Franken, another former admiral and now senator for Iowa, called the chances of the battleships ever entering service “zero.” According to him, it is not without reason that the Chinese have completely skipped the ‘battleship phase’ in building their navy and are relying on “mobility and redundancy” instead of “all-in-one ships” that are difficult to replace. he said in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

Symbolism

However, it seems that symbolism is partly decisive in the Trump class. “The battleship USS Defiant will inspire awe and reverence for the American flag wherever it visits,” said Secretary of the Navy John Phelan. “It will be a source of pride for every American.” Trump said he personally interfered with the design.

In addition to military logic, the Trump class breaks with tradition. Until now, battleships were mostly named after American states. Presidents’ names are reserved for American aircraft carriers. They are then no longer in office.

Zoom in

The newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, was christened in 2013, seven years after Ford’s death. The aircraft carriers William J. Clinton and George W. Bush should enter service in 2034 and 2036 respectively. If construction of the Defiant starts in 2030, it will at least be after Trump’s current term. Only once has an American aircraft carrier been christened while its namesake was still alive, the USS Ronald Reagan in 2001. The former president died in 2004.

But if and when the Trump class it will happen and in what form remains to be seenwrites defense site The War Zone. The American ships that most resemble a battleship, the three ships of the Zumwalt class, which must be able to fire on land from the sea, are considered a failure because they are far too expensive and unseaworthy. And recently the Trump administration construction of the Constellation-class frigates has been cancelled after years of delays due to design problems and cost overruns.

Once before there has been a USS Defiant: one of the fictional spaceships from the series Star Trek.

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