U.S. President Donald Trump calls the vessel a new class of “battleship” graced by his own name, but China just calls the U.S. Navy’s latest concept a larger and “easier target” for its growing array of anti-ship drones and missiles.
A day after Trump’s Dec. 22 announcement at Mar-a-Lago that he had ordered the construction of a “Trump class” of possibly 20 to 25 battleships, China’s Global Times, a state media outlet, carried an interview with naval researcher Zhang Junshe stating that the type of warship envisioned by Trump would be a ripe target for China’s anti-ship weapons, including the so-called “carrier killer” DF-21D ballistic missile.
“The large size of a battleship also makes it more vulnerable and potentially an easier target, particularly when it is densely loaded with munitions,” according to Zhang, a researcher at the People’s Liberation Army Naval Military Academic Research Institute.
In the wake of the announcement, some analysts suggested the battleship proposal may ultimately be not be realistic and instead a move by Trump to jolt awake the U.S. shipbuilding industry, which lags far behind China.
Everyone has called them that for decades, half a century or more. Big battleships are a thing of the past, ww2 their last hurrah. They are too vulnerable and with the weapons out there, it’s better to have more smaller ships than a single big one that could be taken out with one missile or torpedo or mine breaking through.
This is like Hitler getting personally involved in weapons decisions in the war. At one point he took machine guns off the top of tanks for whatever reason he got into his head, determined he was the smartest person in the world. Turned out making them even more of sitting ducks to infantry on the eastern front.
Likewise our leader is surrounded by yes men. No one will tell him he’s wrong, and if they did they would be removed from their positions. So you get outdated super battleships rather than the frigates we have been making.