“Is it really a battleship?” is now the inevitable question when the proposed BBG(X) of the U.S. Navy comes up. The project that is currently in circulation was not a nostalgia project based on armor belts and 16 inch turrets. It is billed as a highly large, densely populated command and control platform aimed at absorbing the work formerly served by retiring cruisers, and has sufficient missiles and electricity to accommodate weapons that have never found a chair at sea. A hull of up to 840-880 feet long and with a tonage of over 35,000 tons is described as rendered and briefed, and this puts it in a nose in the size category which the Navy has not endeavoured to enter in decades with respect to non-carrier combatants.
The Trump-class is a resolution of a practical issue in the framing of the Navy: how to co-ordinate dispersed forces and yet deliver a ship capable of acting as a survivable flagship in the event of stressed networks. The architecture of the ship (large arrays, large staff/processing areas and the power production capacity to withstand upgrades instead of necessitating redesign) cannot be discussed out of context of that argument.
The combat system package proposed is actually maximalist. The delineated baseline involving the program material is based on AN/SPY-6 line of radars, 128 Mk 41 vertical launch cells, and 12 Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic tubes. The most noticeable addition is the railgun: the idea is a 32 megajoule railgun embedded up-front, and high-energy lasers in the 300-600 kW range that would be used to destroy missiles and drones. Combined, the ship is not as much a refined update of a cruise ship as it is an effort to bring together a number of technologies that are stalled or at least near to being stalled onto a single platform that can actually supply them with power, cooling and volume. The risk is also that consolidation.
Critics are less concerned with the fact that their hardware may or may not be impressive but with what the Navy abandons to deploy it. Mark F. Cancian was open in arguing that this program is bound to fail over time, under cost and concept-of-operations pressure, as he wrote that “this ship will never sail.” There is some skepticism about the ability to make gravity: the smaller Zumwalt-class destroyer had already required 11 years between the start of the program and the commissioning of the first ship, and BBBG(X) would be much larger and more complicated. It is also of how the Navy has changed to a distributed mode, distributing sensors and shooters over a large array of nodes, when compared to BBG(X) that puts capability in a few highly valued hulls.
The force multiplier effect of rising costs has heightened the ideological debate surrounding the program. Estimates of the costs of follow-on ships have been projected to be substantially higher than initially anticipated. The program’s proponents believe that the ship would function as a facilitating flagship and a platform for hosting advanced technologies. Its opponents believe that the ship would be a budgetary magnet, and the opportunity costs of the ship could come at the expense of submarines, destroyers, and unmanned systems.
Another, less obtrusive campaign is running under the “battleship” branding: the idea of survivability has ceased to be about heavy armor; it is about feeling first, firing first, and remaining in touch. The concept of Trump-class presupposes that a big ship may be defended with the help of layered interceptors, electronic warfare, and directed energy and also be the nerve center of the fleet. It is only its critics who believe otherwise that the sheer importance of the ship is tempting saturation tactics aimed at breaking down the defenses to make a flagship one possible point of failure.
BBG(X) is to date a stress test of the new priorities of naval design; distribution versus concentration, incremental improvement versus leap-ahead integration, and near-term fleet quantities versus a small-type vessel capable of executing the most power-hungry ambitions of the Navy.
