A ship is simultaneously a weapon, a workforce program and a symbol. The proposed Trump-type battle ship attempts to be all three and in the process puts into one huge hull modern naval danger.
The proponents outline a 30,000-40,000-ton command node that would be placed in the middle of a so-called “Golden Fleet” and which would be equipped with hypersonic missiles, megawatt lasers, electromagnetic railguns and a deep missile magazine. The appeal is clear: a capital ship resembling a shift back to sanity in the age of drones, networks, and pirated oceans. The thing is that the sea has not paid the favor back. Concentration is punished by precision missiles and wide-range sensing, and dispersal, redundancy, and quick reconstitution are rewarded by the modern battle.
Such tension is not abstract. It is already evident in the U.S. Navy that the most impactful shipbuilding program ever in its history demonstrates how dangerous it becomes when too many untested technologies are crammed into the same system. The Ford-class added 23 new technologies, which was later bluntly summed up by Adm. Mike Gilday: There are 23 new technologies on the ship, and that was a choice that added risk to deliver on time and on cost right at the outset. It is the same trap of integration at the heart of Trump-style promises: railguns, high-energy lasers, and advanced missiles are not only required to work but to work in concert, on the sea, even in the battlefield, and the ship must also act as the command-and-control node of the fleet.
That is where the strategic mismatch cuts. The armour is no longer a key factor in survivability in the missile age; this is because electronics, signatures and network resilience take precedence. The history of battleships was that it could take a beating and continue to fight. A contemporary “battlecruiser” loaded out with fancy sensors, data connections, and directed energy gougers transforms into a new type of property, namely a property the power of which is contingent upon delicate systems remaining online. A fleet inherits a weak structure when the same hull is requested to assume the role of the magazine, the shield, and the brain. A single strike, a single mission-kill, a single software cascade may eliminate not only firepower, but also decision-making capability.
The calculating is also inexcusable. The described, Trump-class concept has been linked to a vertical launch battery of the order of 128 cells. That is clumsily matched compared to the current ships, according to Trent Hone: Arleigh Burke-class destroyers carry 96 cells on about a third the volume, and Zumwalt refits are heading toward similar hypersonic strike loads on much smaller hulls. And even without mentioning dollars, making the cells of the fleet few ships cuts the number of firing nodes in the fleet and the number of targets the enemy must know about, and set priorities in hitting them.
Distributed Maritime Operations was constructed around the converse assumption: dispersion provides combat power and friction on the targeting process of the enemy by distribution. The most practical companion of the concept is deception decoys, unmanned systems, and false contacts which increases the number of the visible targets and makes kill chains more complex. Dmitry Filipoff has suggested that deception must become one of the pillars of the strategy, since it would overload the senses and decision-making without the fleet betting all its resources on a few high-priced platforms. A Trump-class center, on the other end, tempts the enemy to concentrate the limited salvos on a conspicuous center.
It can be likened to the Iowa class less than to the Ford class, but that is the most useful analogy: a lesson that ambition on large scale can become its own foe. The symbolism can still be provided by a capital ship, however, the symbol and strategy are not the same deliverable. The unsinkableness of a super-ship is not its size but the point of failure that it generates in an Indo-Pacific sensor-dense battle space that is more and more surviving on the refusal to provide a point of failure to a fleet.
