Trump’s Vanity Fleet
Imagine the CEO of a car company telling his engineers and designers that he wants them to make a new line of automobiles. He knows nothing about cars and has no interest in how they’re produced, but he knows one thing for certain: The line will be named after himself. Everyone claps—because of course they do—but no one really knows what comes next, except that the line needs to look sexy and sporty.
That’s pretty much what the president did today when he announced that a new class of ship named after one Donald J. Trump would be added to the “Golden Fleet,” his name for a renewed U.S. Navy. (You might wonder about the propriety of a sitting president naming naval vessels, among other things, after himself. Pardon the expression, but that ship has sailed.)
Trump’s press conference today was among his more haywire performances, and his slushy delivery and meandering answers will not halt speculation about his cognitive health. When asked for his endgame in the confrontation with Venezuela, for example, he launched into his usual lines about people being sent into the United States from prisons and mental hospitals, as if someone had hit the wrong button and played the wrong recording. He also reiterated that he wanted U.S. ships to be more attractive, noting that he would be involved in the design of the new vessels because “I am a very aesthetic person.”
(Apparently, no one has ever explained to him that sharp design does not equal military value. The B-52 bomber, the mainstay of the U.S. bomber force for decades, was affectionately called the BUFF by its crews. Big, ugly, fat … the rest you can figure out.)
Trump and Navy Secretary John Phelan did make some news today. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth were also on hand, but they limited themselves to some standard-issue sycophancy.) First, we learned that the president of the United States clearly has no idea what battleships are. Second, the United States is going to invest in a new class of naval vessel. Third, America is going to reverse more than 30 years of wise policy by putting nuclear weapons back on U.S. Navy surface vessels.
[Read: The pitiful childishness of Donald Trump]
Trump announced that the new Trump-class ships will be “battleships,” but they seem to be supersize versions of the existing workhorse of the Navy, the Arleigh Burke–class destroyers; the first ship, called the Defiant, will be about three times the size of a Burke. The Navy has also announced the development of a new class of frigates. Destroyers and frigates, as the Navy knows (and as the commander in chief should know) are not battleships. Battleships are huge and powerful, and are meant to dish out —and withstand—serious punishment. Destroyers and frigates are less rugged, and perform missions that require more speed and agility than battleships can muster. But none of that matters: The goal, apparently, was to give a childlike president a new toy, named after himself, in exchange for gobs of money that the Navy will figure out how to spend later.
Indeed, defense investors cheered the announcement, but the spending will likely come much later, because the United States does not have the capacity to build vessels it hasn’t even designed yet. Trump told a reporter today that he expects the first ship to arrive in two and a half years, which is possible if the Navy slaps some gold paint on a Burke class, adds some missiles, and then stencils USS TRUMP on the side. But the last time the Navy really tried to create a new kind of ship—the Zumwalt-class destroyer—the process took years and ended in failure.
The biggest news came today when Phelan said that the new Trump class will carry nuclear weapons. Why? Perhaps Phelan, who has no experience in, or with, the Navy, figured that Trump would want the new ships to have the biggest and best of everything. (Phelan did promise today that they would be the “best-looking” warships in the world.) But like everything else about this chaotic scheme, putting nuclear arms on destroyers or cruisers or “battleships” makes no sense in the 21st century—if it ever did.
During the Cold War, U.S. surface vessels carried all kinds of nuclear munitions for use against other ships, submarines, and land targets, because such was the logic of the Soviet-American standoff: World War III would be a final confrontation of two immense military forces, including nuclear duels at sea. In 1991, with the Soviet Union on its last legs, President George H. W. Bush ordered the removal of all such weapons from the surface fleet. Many Navy officers were relieved: I know from speaking with several at the time that they regarded nuclear weapons on their ships as a useless burden.
Today’s Navy is not going to get into a nuclear showdown with the Soviet fleet. Nor, for that matter, is it likely to trade mushroom clouds at sea with the Chinese or Russian fleets. Carrying nuclear weapons on surface vessels—big, slow, exposed platforms—is not only strategically pointless but also a needless risk. George H. W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, both defense hawks, knew this more than three decades ago.
As with all Trump vanity projects, no one seems to be asking what national purpose is served by these new plans. Does the Navy need new ships? What should it do with them if it gets them? Do they really need to be armed with nuclear weapons? The answer from the Trump administration, clearly, is: Who cares? As retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery told The Wall Street Journal, the Golden Fleet plan is “exactly what we don’t need”—but, he added, no one is focused on America’s maritime needs, because “they are focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”
[Read: This is what presidential panic looks like]
Phelan might not know much about the Navy, but he knows Trump: He promised that the new Trump-class ships will inspire “awe and reverence” in any port they visit. But strategy is more than just giving lethal playthings to a president who has a simplistic understanding of ships. It is the art of making choices, an attempt to match means with ends. In a rational world, this would be the thinking driving the acquisition of weapons.
I taught military officers for more than two decades at the Naval War College. One thing I learned from conversations with my students was that the Navy really needs to invest more in its officers and sailors, and reduce the tempo of operations that are burning them out. The best ships in the world won’t mean much if their crews are fatigued and poorly trained. As the defense analyst John Ferrari recently wrote, for years, the Navy has been “structurally compromised” because its people are exhausted, its ships are “aging faster than they could be repaired,” and the fleet’s readiness is declining. These are serious problems that require serious work, but Trump has found a way around all of this irritating chatter by sticking his name on a new ship and telling the military to go build it.
At Mar-a-Lago today, Trump reiterated his demand that Greenland must become part of the United States. His plan for a fleet of Trump-branded battleships is only slightly more likely to happen than a victory parade in Nuuk—and neither is in the national interest of the United States.