A recent article claims that the US needs battleships for freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs). The oxymoron called military planning will conjoin with rising Trumpian MIC budgets in the spirit of 1980s Reagan military policy.
The second Trump term in hopes of a Reaganesque legacy might want to negotiate a second Naval Treaty in 2022 to counter the threat of the Chinese PLA fleet. This will have the same winning character of the first phase of the US-China Trade War and the withdrawal from the Iranian JCPOA.
The 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan, who had run on the promise of a six-hundred-ship U.S. Navy, proved an opportunity to reactivate the four Iowa-class battleships yet again. The GOP loves its props like in 2012’s use of the USS Wisconsin.
A Trumpian navy in love with steam airplane catapults on carriers will want an “unrammable” surface fleet and a Trumpian military of “dopes and losers” will want to revisit a battleship armaments race and a subsequent treaty.
Then Trump will want to ignore it and start building Bismark-class battleships once the treaty is in effect, since there will be an escalator clause that Trump will like because of the words like “escalator” and “ramming speed”.
After all, Article II of the Constitution “lets him do whatever he wants”, even if there aren’t two naval vessels in the world but submarines and targets.
March 2019
But there's no need for the Navy to build an old-fashioned battleship in the twenty-first century when it can build a new-fashioned battleship instead.
A contemporary battleship would combine advanced armor materials with automated damage control to produce a ship that is virtually unsinkable. Its offensive armaments might be mission-specific, but its key attribute would be survivability. It would be a ship that could be put in harm's way in the reasonable expectation of coming home in one piece.
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That's where the battleship of the future comes in: it would give the United States a defensive option for limited conflict. For example, a future battleship could respond to Chinese provocations by disabling Chinese seabed sensors or cutting Chinese undersea cables. It could survive being rammed by enemy ships—a favorite tactic of the Chinese and North Koreans. And if A2/AD did escalate into a shooting war, it could operate in the danger zone while U.S. offensive actions turned the tables.
The U.S. Navy will never again be a dreadnought fleet of big-gun battleships. But it is time to reexamine the role of armor in naval architecture. Even the most forward-leaning offensive operation needs a few tough linesmen who can take a beating and stay in the game. A future battleship would give the Navy— and by extension the president—warfighting options other than the total annihilation of the enemy. Regular FONOPs already demonstrate the need for such options. The A2/AD threat will likely generate even more dangerous missions that only a durable battleship of the future can safely perform.
nationalinterest.org/…
"Some ships are designed to sink… others require our assistance."