Key Points
Trump’s battleship plan clashes with decades of U.S. naval strategy and technology shifts
Experts described it as a “prestige project,” a “bomb magnet” and said that “this ship will never sail.”
Even if it were technically feasible, the cost of building the battleship would be prohibitive.
The very first thought that popped into my head when I heard about this was that Trump is so stupid he doesn’t even realize that we haven’t actively used battleships in our naval doctrine since the end of World War 2. Aircraft carriers will always be more versatile, have longer range, and cast a larger sphere of influence than a battleship of any size ever will.
So this is little more than a glorified pet project to stroke Trump’s fragile ego, set to the tune of multiple billions of dollars in R&D and private contracts to his wealthy friends, for a project that will unlikely be done before he leaves office or leaves this mortal coil, whichever comes first.
I expect that if we end this madness and get a Democrat in office, if they have any good sense at all, they’ll cancel the project. However, the damage will be done between now and the next three years. Taxpayer money will be shoveled into this pit and evaporate into the ether.
I’ll be honest, I doubt any real money is being dumped into this.
More and more, things like this come across as people giving Trump nonsense toys to play with to feel bigly important and distract him as he gets more and more infirm. If any money actually moves towards this, it’ll be actually diverting into someone’s pocket along the way.
It struck me the most when he made the announcement of a new class of Jumbo Jet and he was literally sitting there at his desk like a kid playing with a lego airplane model.
He is increasingly a addled child that they keep distracted with stupid shit like this so that they can get work done without him fucking it up for them by opening his idiot mouth. (like admitting that Venuzuela was about oil…for example)
He really is Hitler brained.
Poor guy wants to see his name on everything and the biggest boat with biggest guns would be his favorite.
Goddamn his parents should have taken him to a psych hospital
Now we just have to get him in a bunker with nowhere else to go
Such an insecure little boy that late 70s man is.
America is never recovering from this shit show.
In other words: the idea of a battleship is as outdated as the idiot in the White House who had it.
The obsession with a Navy that can fight three different wars on opposite sides of the planet is outdated and the product of paranoid, reactionary, imperialist foreign policy.
Our biggest trading partners are increasingly our biggest geopolitical rivals. At some point, we either need to reconcile these contradictions or surrender intentional trade as a possibility into the next century
The easiest way to deal with the US at this point is simply to drop US bonds on the market. That could easily destroy what Trump has not yet destroyed of the economy.
That’s… debatable. Unless you’re holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth, nobody is really going to complain when you feed a valuable commodity to the secondary market at a discount.
The real pain the US has felt comes from the crimps in the Supply Chain. Yemen shutting the Suez Canal has done incalculable harm to US trade. If we saw similar pressure in Panama and Singapore?
Even beyond that, climate change is going to hit North America extra hard over the next few years. Probably the meanest thing a foreign country could do right now is whisper in the ears of every Great Lakes resident “They’re coming for your water”.
I’m not talking about you or me doing this. But Japan, China, the UK and the EU are holding trillions of US debt…
Individuals and organizations within these countries hold this debt, but they hold it as collateral against their own debts and liabilities. They hold Treasuries because of the guaranteed valuation and ROI. And you’ll be hard to find anything comparable to replace Treasuries with.
Now, should the ECB start issuing “Eurobonds” that function the same way as US Treasuries? Should the Pacific Rim organize as a regional financial block independent of the US Federal Reserve and Wall Street? Absolutely.
But simply dumping US Treasuries onto the open market doesn’t get you there.
Like, the navy hasn’t used battleships in decades because they are obsolete to deystroyers, that kind of obstacle?
really what we need are destroyer sized drone platforms anyways.
Meanwhile, our Navy’s skeleton crews have a tough enough time simply avoiding ramming tankers. Maintenance is also suffering, and since we have the largest fleet on Earth, it all seems rather pointless.
The money would be better spent on our existing fleet, I think.
the true enemy of all conservatives
It’s going to take, minimum, 10 years to build, right? And that’s not counting any design, planning, and other ships that may be in progress at our shipyards. He’s never going to see it. So let’s just tell him we’re building it, and not.
Honestly, if I was some admiral trying to protect a bunch of R&D projects in development from Trump, I’d probably wrap as many of them as I could into a pitch for a big battleship with his name on it then spend the entire budget on the technologies that are supposedly going into the ship. Put basically no effort into the ship itself, just show him concept art and maybe send him a model or something to make him think progress is being made.
But he drew a picture himself on the back of a napkin, can’t they use that? They surely don’t need EXPERTS to design it, Trump’s an expert, no-one knows more about ships than him.
How could a large incredibly expensive slow moving warship that’s really easy to locate and follow possibly be a bad idea? It’s not like you can quickly, cheaply, and easily cram a bunch of explosives in a few unnamed submersibles and sink those ships for a fraction of the cost, right?
Literally the only thing this has going for it is how much of the world would be united in support of watching the USS Donnie Dotard sink into the ocean depths where it is crushed beyond all recognition.
You know this is fake because the ship isn’t pure gold
Every word makes sense but … It does not matter. It needs to be big, it must have (the illusion) of impressive and it has to carry his name.
I bet if Trump stays in power long enough he will inevitably demand that it is painted gold.
Trump’s Foley
Pissing into an ocean of piss
