I haven’t been posting much lately, but every now and then an issue that I feel qualified to talk about catches my eye. Today, it’s the announcement of plans for a new “Trump”-class battleship, the USS Defiant. A lot of people out there in social media have been posting uninformed comments on the topic. Much of that commentary seems to begin and end with “I hate anything Trump does, so I’m going to assume this is the worst and most stupid idea that could possibly be advanced at this moment.”

I don’t think that’s a very useful starting point for discussing a serious national security issue. In the interest of arming people with a better understanding of what’s being proposed, I’m going to dive into this a bit.

While it’s true that I was only a junior officer a long time back, I am a former Surface Warfare Officer who studied modern naval warfighting professionally for a few years, and I kept up as an interested civilian ever since. If you’re better-informed than I am, you can stop reading! Otherwise, I hope you’ll allow me to clarify a couple of things.

Yes, Battleships Are Obsolete

People hear the word “battleship” and immediately assume Trump wants a big ship with big guns. Then they point out that no one’s built a new battleship since the 1940s and that any such design is hopelessly obsolete. That’s not entirely fair, since the Iowa-class ships reactivated in the 1980s and 1990s gave pretty good service. In fact, they were active while I was in the service, and I got a chance to walk around on the modernized vessels a time or two. But as much as I admire the power and looks of the Iowa-class ships, a large ship whose primary armament is heavy artillery is, indeed, not suited for modern naval warfare. A modern warship needs to be armed with missiles that can strike targets hundreds of miles away, not guns. And it should be able to shoot down aircraft, too.

The modernized Iowa-class ships did carry a lot of Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles. Their 16” guns, however, were only useful in a few limited situations. Which is a shame, because they were pretty cool. Still, “cool” is not a reason to build more Iowa-class ships, or even a 21^st-century version of one.

But USS Defiant Is NOT a Battleship

Fortunately, the design concept revealed in the Golden Fleet announcement is not a 1940s-era battleship. The USS Defiant (BBG-1) is a large warship armed with 140+ missiles as its primary armament. Trump’s battleship has much more in common with a modern Arleigh Burke-class destroyer or Russia’s Kirov-class missile cruisers than it does with an Iowa-class battleship.

Why call it a “battleship” at all, then? I imagine it’s simply marketing—an appeal to the vanity of a notoriously vain president. Really, the Defiant concept we’ve been shown is a large guided-missile cruiser. Any fair assessment of the idea should proceed on that basis.

(You’ll note that the designation given the Defiant concept is “BBG-1.” In naval parlance, BB means battleship, and -G means its primary armament is guided missiles. I would probably call the design a “large cruiser” like the USS Alaska, and designate it CBG-1. But that’s just me.)

How Do We Feel About Missile Cruisers, Then?

The short answer: A big new missile cruiser is a fine idea. The only question in my mind is opportunity cost – what are we *not* building if we go forward with building the BBG-1 class?

As far as I can tell, we could probably build 2 or 3 Arleigh Burkes for the cost of one Defiant. Plus, the Burkes are a proven design. We can build more of them right now. That would be a better investment in the short term, since a more numerous fleet with distributed firepower is something we desperately need to win a fight against China if (God forbid) one comes our way in the next few years.

Even though they’re “only” destroyers, the Arleigh Burkes are arguably the most powerful surface warfare vessels in the world. The Japanese have some destroyers that are just as good, since they’re essentially Japanese-built Burkes. As for the Chinese, they’re building new classes that appear to be equivalent to an Arleigh Burke on paper, such as the Type 055 … although how well the Chinese ships would actually perform is anyone’s guess. We have recent and relevant proof that a Burke can shoot down drones, anti-ship cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles in combat conditions. So far, the People’s Liberation Army Navy has not been put to the test.

Given that, you might ask what can one Defiant do that two or three Burkes couldn’t. The immediate answer is carry hypersonic missiles. The BBG-1 design shows plans for a dozen or more Conventional Prompt Strike missile tubes. That’s not nothing. A Defiant anywhere within a couple of thousand miles holds enemy targets at risk (I’m guessing at the range, since nothing’s been published about that for the CPS, as far as I can tell). However, we already have a class of ship being refitted to carry hypersonic missiles: the Zumwalt-class destroyers. We could build one Zumwalt + one Burke, and get most of what we want from a Defiant.

Finally, the Defiant concept also includes a lot of expandability for future technology. The Burkes are currently “maxed out” for generator capacity and hull space, so new directed-energy weapons or railguns aren’t a good fit. So, while the short-term answer is “build more Burkes,” the long-term answer starts to favor investing in a new class of warship.

So, Should We Build USS Defiant (BBG-1)?

Call me a guarded “yes,” simply because I believe we’re at an “all of the above” point with our naval construction. We need more of everything as fast as we can build it, damn the cost. But I’ll dig into the question of should and could in another post.

Hope this helped!