A battle ship-shaped hull is no longer something to be counted upon as a battleship value. The beauty of a suggested Trump-type surface combatant lies in the antiquity of an ancient naval philosophy: place a big, conspicuous, armed ship on the front and the deterrent action is automatic. In the targeting environment of the present day, that visibility may become a liability unless the purpose of the ship and the defenses and the underlying fleet architecture are designed as a single entity.
The Trump-type argument has become divided into two familiar camps: a modernized version of the capital ship as a tool of presence, command-and-control, and concentrated firepower; on the other end, it is an expensive symbol, which is easily targeted by the precision missiles, drones, and space-enabled tracking. Both frames may be simultaneously true based on whether the ship becomes a part of a bigger doctrine, or a monument of its own.
The most effective operation case is not the armor nostalgia, but the vow of the survivable surface hub capable of organizing sensing, electronic warfare, and long-range fires and the presence of a deep missile load. But that promise also comes into collision with one of the fundamental limitations of modern surface warfare, the ability of magazines to empty and not to refill fast. To this day, reloading vertical launch cells can often require a ship to maneuver out of position to a distant port, and this is where planners usually get in a loop where presence and firepower trade places each other instead of strengthening each other. A “battleship” which is incapable of remaining operational on station grows into a paradox imposing and at intervals of use.
This is why it may be more interesting to ask not whether a massive vessel becomes like deterrence, but whether it alters the missile economy of a campaign.
Another option which is emphasized in the literature in professional navy is that missile capacity may be distributed rather than concentrated. The idea of Proceedings to revive the Arsenal Ship, redesigned as a powered barge of arsenal, reformulates the issue: no longer would one construct a single beautiful magazine, but would drive missiles out on to plainer platforms, which then would be manipulated by the action of a “mother ship”. The barge concept proposed suggests 12 to 48 VLS cells on a minimally manned (or optionally unmanned) hull with modest speed taken in exchange with scalable capacity and dispersion survivability. In such architecture, the high-end surface combatant manages to save its own cells but relies on offboard magazines to maintain air-defense or terrestrial-attack fires and also jettisons spent barges back to port and replaces with new ones. The technical reasoning is simple: strength is in the fact that there is no point of failure but the system can suffer a loss and continue to operate.
The Trump-type pitch also bets heavily on the need to incorporate high-technology defenses, in particular the need to defend against high-speed attacks. In this case, the trendline is important: hypersonic missile defense has shifted over to space-enabled tracking and interceptors that are able to engage during the glide phase. The transformation to a system of tracking bodies enabled and sustained by space sensors and the role of the U.S Navy in setting up a glide-phase interceptor using Aegis-capable vessels places a high value on networked sensing and command-and-control. It also implies that the survival of a large surface ship is not merely a factor of its own radar and missiles; but it requires that it integrates well into a larger architecture allowing it to detect, track and assign interceptors quickly enough to make a difference.
At the fleet level, future maritime requirements strategy work is moving in the direction of a hybrid force with unmanned systems predominating, and where the availability and upkeep of platforms is the source of real combat power, as much as procurement. The same discussion highlights the drawback of having a multi-billion-dollar platform sidelined for maintenance, and how future sea power is linked on the inexpensive means of presence and precision mass. A Trump-type hull would then be required to compete as a warship, as well as as a superior solution to the maintenance of missiles, sensors and command capabilities than distributed solutions like unmanned boats, submarines and offboard magazines.
The argument, however, is not necessarily one of bringing the battle ship back to life but rather of coming up with a fleet that would be able to remain on post, remain in supply and remain difficult to attack. A ship that is focused on symbolism but not on those mechanics is prone to being the most noticeable aspect of the force and potentially the easiest to target in adversary planning.
