LETTER: A Trump vanity project
President Donald Trump announced that the Navy will build a new class of battleship. The eponymous Trump class — of course — will see the first ship commissioned the USS Defiant. Mr. Trump said the battleships will be “the fastest, the biggest and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.” But bigger is not always better.
This will be the first U.S. battleship construction plan since 1944, and there is good reason for that. The cost, the maintenance and the strategic use of the battleship class became near obsolete in the late 1920s with the rise of the aircraft carrier class that has since dominated naval strategy and battle space.
The U.S. carrier fleet decimated the Japanese fleet, to include battleships, at Midway in June 1942, near duplicating the catastrophic carnage Japanese aircraft inflicted on our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The strategic usefulness of battleships became secondary to the primacy of carrier fleets from this point.
Not surprising is our commander-in-chief’s lack of attention to the destructive employment of Ukrainian drones on the high seas against Russian assets. Lethality at low cost in terms of personnel and materiel should be a principal objective of national military strategy not aesthetically pleasing presidential vanity projects costing billions.
