Donald Trump made headlines this week by announcing the creation of a new class of “battleship”, as he put it—a large, “Trump Class” surface combatant armed with the latest weapons.
The usual detractors sounded off immediately, of course—talking about how such ships are obsolete in this day and age, and even more so when they have anything to do with a President that has attracted a preternatural level of hatred. For my part, Christmas had some indeed with a great story opportunity for this column.
Is a Trump-class warship a good idea, or just a good publicity stunt? To answer that, we are going to take a dive worthy of at least most modern attack subs into a subject that is almost never written about—modern naval warfare.
If I seem to skim through some things, it’s because there is a lot of ground to cover. The good thing is, most of what “was” in this realm is firmly in the past, and there is a desperate need to focus on the modern situation, which is much different.
Modern naval warfare began in earnest in the late 1800s with the convergence of several technologies; high grade steel, electrification, modern smokeless gunpowder, modern high explosives, and reliable engines that could drive large warships great distances. From these we got the first modern warships; the most famous being the British dreadnought.
A race began among the Great Powers to emulate this and similar platforms. What emerged by 1914 were seagoing monsters; one of which could have put paid to an entire fleet of warships from sixty years earlier. The same technologies drove another class of ship from a mostly nuisance novelty to a lethal threat to even these monsters—the submarine. One such vessel was instrumental in igniting U.S. participation in the Great War.
World War One duly set up the next Great War. By that time, a new class of warship had joined the ranks—the aircraft carrier. The “battleship admirals” who saw naval warfare as an ever- building contest between guns, steel, and size laughed at the weird flat-top ships letting their seemingly rickety airplanes into the sky.
When one of those planes hit Germany’s meanest battleship with torpedoes and jammed its rudder so it could be hunted down by the British Navy, the laughter stopped, and the horror began. Soon after followed two of Britain’s best battlecruisers being sunk by carrier- based aviation and an entire fleet being crippled at Pearl Harbor by the same.
Naval battles in the Pacific being fought between carriers began to occur with hardly any warships from either side seeing the others directly. The die was cast. The Iowa-class battleships were the last American battleships built; the planned Montana-class battleships were cancelled.
And suddenly on the horizon, there was a mushroom cloud. Whole fleets could, in theory, vanish in a nuclear fireball. Technology continued to advance; now joined by the jet engine and ever more capable electronics. What were we to do now?
What emerged was an American model of naval power with the rest of the world trying to keep up, stay out of the way, pray the Americans were on their side in the next war, or in the case of the Soviet Union, trying to look ahead into the future and bet their vision surpassed the American one.
The Americans built naval task forces around the aircraft carrier; the queen of battle that all of the other ships would protect. The Russians tried to perfect the anti-ship missile and platforms for it in response. In the interim, the nuclear submarine arrived and now no one on the water’s surface was safe.
A huge race ensued between the Soviets and NATO to build the most lethal attack submarines, while hiding a huge stick—a nuclear deterrent, on ballistic missile submarines in the water’s depths. The Soviets needed an ace in the hole against American carriers, with early anti-ship missiles and Soviet electronic warfare struggling. The Americans needed to protect their carriers so they could deliver their traditional striking power.
And distance—lots of it, was good. The F-14 Tomcat fighter was built to take on Russian bombers a long way away from the carriers, and fleets spread out more. Each side watched the other nervously, wondering who would win if a third world war ensued and all of this stuff actually got used. It never did. Well.. almost never.
In 1982 something interesting happened in the Falklands. Britain and Argentina fought a brief combined arms contest around those islands with technology ranging between 1960 to 1980. What came out of that was several British warships heavily damaged and sunk by Argentine airpower that got through to hit them with bombs and with Exocet anti-ship missiles as the British played a somewhat static defense for their forces to land and retake the islands.
On the other hand, one Argentine cruiser met a British nuclear attack submarine and quickly died. Lessons learned? First, those airplanes were getting more lethal. Second, the missiles were too, and could kill those big ships in earnest. If you had warships, you’d better be able to protect them from both. And third… those damned submarines were a menace. The Argentine General Belgrano had never had a chance. Would a U.S. carrier do better?
More money went into defending further out and defeating enemy electronics. We looked nervously at all of the big anti-ship missiles the Soviets were building. Everyone looked nervously at the waves and imagined the submarines that might be out there, benefitting from the same technological advances as everyone else was.
We built the Los-Angeles class attack submarine specifically to protect our carriers. The Soviets nervously bought copies of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. We tried to build better warships, but were sometimes stymied about what that meant. Did they need to be stealthier? Carry more missiles? Smaller? Or should we build more submarines? Were the submarine captains right about all surface ships being nothing but targets? (A true saying among them….)
Things went back to how they were, with all sides trying to guess what would come next for warships and wringing lessons learned furiously out of intelligence reports and limited engagements. Wargamers had a ball. National leaders had headaches.
The Big One between Eastern and Western fleets never happened before the Soviet Union collapsed; sending most of its fleet into the harbor and liable to be auctioned off by the constable. Defense contractors shook their heads in sorrow.
And much later, China now has tried to achieve great-power status, and has a large navy at the centerpiece of that strategy as it pertains to the oceans. The U.S. has gotten to rest more or less comfortably on its naval laurels for the last forty years, with no serious naval competition that wasn’t friendly.
The first thing China publicly did was target the U.S. Navy’s traditional center of gravity, the aircraft carrier. More and better missiles were coming, they said, and would be waiting if the capitalist running dogs (that are buying all their stuff) tried to interfere in Taiwan.
As the missile electronics have been getting better and better (just look at a phone from the year 2000 versus one in 2025) and we have been training Chinese engineers to make, or steal, the very best technology, we have been getting nervous. Where does that leave us as we close out 2025? I would say, just here… with the following truths.
1. The seat of naval purpose has been, and always is, on the land. Every exercise in naval power projection is to the end of causing an effect there. Today it’s Taiwan; a century ago it was British ports. So, the test is always going to be there.
2. Warships have seen less functional change to them than airplanes. They are still big, relatively slow, and have as their purpose the launching of projectiles at enemy forces; naval or on land. The projectiles have gotten more accurate and harder to dodge, and can fly farther and faster; either on their own or carried by surrogate airplanes. But the main idea is the same as a century ago: Find the enemy, fix the enemy in your sights, and destroy them before they do the same to you. Whoever locates their targets first and gets their weapons accurately off first has a huge advantage.
3. To understand modern navies, you have to understand how they started off; warships are huge investments in money and crews. Losing a modern one equals billions of dollars gone, perhaps hundreds or a thousand crew dead, and a tragedy on the scale of September 11th. Losing a U.S. carrier would be a huge prestige blow.
4. Naval forces advanced as they did because of forced fiscal and doctrinal conservatism. Going with what works is always safer than leaping ahead. New technologies are eyed suspiciously, and the best navies can be very crotchety about changes to tactics, techniques, and procedures. The British went into World War One handling their ships in formation much like they had a century before. After all, if you do something new and it doesn’t work, what will the physical and professional price be?
But now, there’s no choice. Innovation is demanded.
Improvements in materials, sensors, communications, and computers are upending the naval arms race more so than was done with the arrival of the carrier, or the missile.
Everything on and below the surface is being called into question; smaller ships and submarines with minimal crews, or drones that are unmanned, are on the drawing boards. Traditional naval construction is going to give way to faster and more streamlined platforms that are more versatile than outgrowths of older warship designs.
No one wants to be in the position the British were in when Japanese torpedo planes slaughtered the cruisers Prince of Wales and Repulse, or have their Bismarck effectively destroyed by what was the World War Two equivalent of a first person view drone. Today, that will end your war. You won’t rebuild or recover in time.
Let’s take a detour to Ohio, and a company you have probably never heard of; Anduril. Founder Palmer Luckey, in addition to being a Trump supporter, is quietly upending American military procurement from traditional defense contracting to rapid fire innovation.
I don’t know that he will be involved with “Yuge” Trump-class warships, but I would be willing to bet it’s a strong possibility. Flip-flops can be stronger than the hull of the mightiest battleship, and the Pentagon knows it now.
Companies like Anduril will deliver the Trump-class warships, which I will predict will more closely resemble battlecruisers, as the original battleships were built heavily to withstand the shock of their big guns firing and to be able to take hits coming in with their armor. Today, that weight and space can be used for more things. I will predict the following profile:
Trump-class Battlecruiser—
Mission: Fast precision delivery of munitions on naval and surface targets over long distances with rapid redeployment following launches. Serving as the principal offensive and command/control/communication element of a naval task force.
Armament: Multiple VLS (Vertical Launch System) cell groups capable of holding a variety of mission-required missiles.
- Evolved Standard/Improved Deuce surface to air missiles
- Deuce Hypersonic surface attack missiles optimized for naval and land static targets
- Stealthy cruise missiles, i.e. LRASM.
- Unmanned aerial vehicles with surrogate launch, electronic warfare, and surveillance capability
- Point defense lasers, light antiaircraft missiles, automatic cannons
- Short to medium range retractable naval guns with standard and precision guided projectiles
- Possible: Electromagnetic ”rail” guns with high velocity, minimal fire-to-target time
- Supercavitating and standard torpedoes and antisubmarine drones
Electronics: Evolved Aegis-based SPY LPI radar and thermal systems with active and passive electronic sensors, lattice-based networked warfare, electronic capabilities to include active jamming and network penetration “hacking” of enemy systems; active and passive decoy systems.
Other vehicles stored: Aerial, surface, and subsurface drones.
Weight: 60,000 tons maximum
Speed: Estimate 40-50 knots maximum
Crew: Under 100 sailors
Structure: Stealthy, minimized feature profile for low radar and infra-red cross sections, minimal sonar reflectivity.
Propulsion: Nuclear with thrusters/screw jets for minimal radiated noise, plus providing the power for the rail guns.
We will see what happens, but the warship isn’t dead, and neither is the battleship, at least as it can be understood in modern times. Merry Christmas to the Navy.
Mark Deuce has had a life-long career in community law enforcement. He is the author of Deuces Wild for TTP.
