On December 22, Donald Trump made one of the many unexpected announcements of his already eclectic presidency at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence: the US Navy will acquire a class of battleships named after Trump. In the broader program to revitalize the US Navy called the Golden Fleet, the flagship would be none other than a new class of guided-missile battleships named after him.
He was joined in the announcement by Secretary of War Peter Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan. Although the first unit of the Trump class, the USS Defiant (BBG-1), is still a long way off, the US Navy immediately created an ad hoc website to present Trump’s plan and his “battleships.”
The return of battleships
Trump’s intention is to bring back battleships, which from the late 19th century until World War II represented the non plus ultra of a state’s power projection capabilities, only to be supplanted by aircraft carriers.
Battleships are an old obsession of Trump’s: in September 2015, while still a candidate for what would become his first presidency, in a speech from the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61), decommissioned in 1990 and turned into a museum in 1998, he had speculated about its return to service.
Trump’s September statement
Trump then returned to the subject last September at the meeting for senior US Armed Forces officers organized at short notice by Hegseth in Quantico. On that occasion, Trump declared the return of armor and bullets after the era of aluminum ships and missiles:
“I think maybe we should start thinking about battleships. Some would say, ‘No, that’s obsolete technology.’ I don’t know. I don’t think it’s obsolete technology when you look at those guns. It’s something we’re actually considering: the concept of a battleship, fantastic, with six-inch [152 mm. Ed.] sides, solid steel. Not aluminum, which melts: if you see a missile coming, it starts melting when the missile is about two miles away. Now those ships aren’t built that way anymore, but look at it. Secretary Phelan likes it, and I’m pretty open to the idea. And shells are much cheaper than missiles.
What the USS Defiant, the lead ship of the “Trump class,” should look like, according to artists at the U.S. Naval Systems Command
Following in the footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan
Trump’s announcement symbolically recalls two great Republican presidents: Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Trump’s Golden Fleet is linked to the Great White Fleet: the 16 US battleships (with white-painted hulls) that sailed around the world between 1907 and 1909 to promote the global role of the United States, symbolizing Roosevelt’s policy.
Reagan, meanwhile, launched the 600-ship Navy. The aim was to restore the US Navy‘s role as a deterrent and projection force, which had been weakened after the Vietnam War. Reagan’s plan focused on keeping ships in service longer and speeding up the production of new Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and Los Angeles-class submarines. But the calling card of the 600-ship Navy program was the reactivation of the four Iowa-class battleships. The last battleships in service, which had been placed in reserve – ‘mothballed’ – at the end of World War II, had reappeared briefly on the seas during the Korean and Vietnam wars.
The Trump battleship
For now, all there is of the Trump class is the announcement and the US Navy mini-site with some rough specifications. Trump’s announcement comes at a time when the limitations of US military shipbuilding capacity are evident, causing delays in most of the naval programs currently underway.
This raises doubts about the feasibility of a project such as the Trump class. At the same time, although the future USS Defiant (BBG-1) appears well equipped on paper and has an interesting combination of weapons, its arsenal could be almost undersized in relation to its size (at least 35,000 tons and 260 meters long).
Not to mention the fact that the Trump’s mix of weapons includes systems that the United States seemed to have shelved (railguns, or electromagnetic acceleration cannons) or that are still far from fully operational (such as hypersonic missiles and heavy lasers).
A brief history of the battleship
But before we get to the Trump class, we need to take a step back and explain how these once-central naval units disappeared from the seas. And how the US Navy retired its last battleship only in 1992, perhaps more by chance and for image reasons than for true strategic deterrence, when the era of battleships had been over for half a century.
The battleship as we understand it in the 20th century was born with the HMS Dreadnought, the first single-caliber battleship to enter service with the British Royal Navy in 1906. Single-caliber because the main armament consisted entirely of guns of the same caliber: in the case of the Dreadnought, ten 305 mm guns in five twin turrets.
Before the Dreadnought, battleships had 233 mm guns to “frame the target” and 305 mm guns to finish off the enemy. Having all guns of the same caliber meant simplifying armament, logistics, and aiming. Although the first ship of this type was British, the idea was Italian. It was the Italian naval engineer Vittorio Cuniberti who published the article “An ideal Battleship for The British Navy” in Jane’s Fighting Ships magazine in 1903, explaining the single-caliber philosophy.
With the Dreadnought, a race for ever larger and more powerful battleships began. The Dreadnought, still almost… under warranty, had already been outclassed in 1909 by what were christened super-dreadnoughts. The caliber of the guns became 320, 356, then 381 mm, and between the two wars it reached 406 mm. The range of the guns exceeded that of the horizon, as was the case with the 381 mm guns of the Italian battleships Littorio. Record-breaking performance, but of little practical use. The pinnacle of this race was the Japanese super-battleships Yamato and Musashi, weighing 70,000 tons and armed with nine 460 mm guns, the largest ever mounted on warships. The United States responded to the Yamato with the Iowa, armed with nine 406 mm guns, which were destined to survive even during the Cold War. The other battleships disappeared with World War II, a conflict that would retire the battleship and bring the aircraft carrier to the fore as the new Queen of the Seas.
Taranto and Pearl Harbor: the end of the battleship
Although World War II began with ‘classic’ cannon battles between the German battleship Graf Spee and a group of British cruisers (December 17, 1939), first came the so-called ‘Night of Taranto’, when British biplane torpedo bombers took off from HMS Illustrious and damaged three Italian battleships anchored in the Apulian port (November 10-11, 1940), and then Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) definitively established the superiority of air and naval operations over battleships. It was precisely the absence of US aircraft carriers in the Pearl Harbor harbor during the Japanese surprise attack that allowed the US Navy to easily resume operations in the Pacific.
As the war continued, all the belligerents realized that it was not worth investing resources in battleships, which were as expensive as they were useless. In the summer of 1942, the US Navy halted work on the hulls of the last two Iowa-class ships: Illinois (BB-65) and Kentucky (BB-66).
And in July 1943, it canceled the first two units of the new Montana class, which had been authorized in 1940 but whose construction had not yet begun.
Similarly, in June 1942, the Japanese began converting the Shinano, designed as the third Yamato-class battleship, into an aircraft carrier. Italy also considered this option, evaluating the possibility of transforming the unfinished Impero, the fourth Littorio-class battleship, into an aircraft carrier.
With a few exceptions, almost all the battleships lost during World War II met their fate at the hands of aircraft: the Bismarck, sunk by British battleship guns, had been fatally damaged at the rudders by a torpedo bomber; the British Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by Japanese aircraft off the coast of Malaysia; in the aftermath of September 8, 1943, it was the turn of the superb Roma, of the Littorio class, sunk in a single blow by a German Fritz-X guided bomb; the sister ship of the Bismarck, the Tirpitz, was in turn seriously damaged by British bombers before being finished off by assault craft copied from those of the Italian Decima Mas; Finally, the Musashi and the Yamato were defeated by the US Navy, with the latter having the small consolation of having managed to get within firing range of the escort aircraft carrier Gambier Bay, sinking it on October 25, 1944, near Samar in the Philippines.
Reduced to escort ships for aircraft carrier teams and floating batteries to support landing operations, battleships still retained a prestigious and representative role: they were the venue for the summit between Roosevelt and Churchill and the site of Japan’s surrender ceremony, signed on the deck of the USS Missouri (BB-63), which would also be the last battleship to remain in service, until March 31, 1992. [1 – continued]
Official White House photo, credit: Daniel Torok, public domain
