re: How do you protect Battleships in the modern era? Trump building 25

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you're making the case against large platforms.

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The poster was only arguing against BBs, not all large surface platforms. I was merely countering on the vulnerability point. And I was right.

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And if the argument is that carriers are still worth it despite that vulnerability, isn’t that because they provide a unique capability, mobile airpower, that no other platform can replace?

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If a CVN goes down with all hands and equipment, that is a MASSIVE loss to the entire nation. Resources that likely cannot be replaced in a generation. And now, with the extreme range of ground based aircraft pretty much proven now, it can be argued far more easily that a large gun platform (with expanded drone capabilities) is an "easier to risk" asset than a super carrier, more or less equally shows the flag and rattles the saber for most purposes and, ultimately, easier to replace (I'm speaking mainly about the nuclear reactor and the air wing - just massive, massive investment in resources that could, in modern times, be taken out by assets under $100k).

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What is the argument for concentrating those weapons on a single hull rather than mitigating risk by spreading them across multiple cheaper and harder to detect platforms? An aircraft carrier has aircraft.

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And a gun platform has guns.

I agree with you on the broader point. We should be getting out of the "power projection from carrier task forces" business. Altogether, if we can. We can project power from the United States, easily. We can destroy any nation, remotely. And, if we really wanted to, we could destroy any Chinese, Indian or Russian fleet, remotely. Most of them could do the same to ours.

So, if it is going to be a war of economical attrition, we should be more like the U.S. or U.S.S.R. during WWII rather than Nazi Germany and their gigantism fetish.

#YouandIdonotdisagreeonpolicy

I was just talking in terms of vulnerability - a BB is NO MORE vulnerable than a CVN and an "easier to risk" asset, IMHO.

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If a CVN goes down with all hands and equipment, that is a MASSIVE loss to the entire nation. Resources that likely cannot be replaced in a generation.

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I actually agree with this point completely. Losing a CVN would be a catastrophic national loss in lives, capability, and industrial capacity that we likely couldn’t replace for a generation.

That’s exactly why I don’t understand voluntarily increasing that kind of risk for no clear gain. Carriers at least justify their risk by providing a unique capability: mobile airpower that nothing else can replace. If we accept that concentration of people and hardware is dangerous, the logical response is to be extremely selective about when it’s warranted.

A new “Trump battleship” would be the shiniest propaganda target imaginable. Huge, visible, politically symbolic, and explicitly branded. If it doesn’t add a capability we don’t already have, then all it does is concentrate more American lives and resources into a target that adversaries would love to plan around.

This isn’t about politics. Strip the names off it and ask the hard question: what do we gain that justifies putting thousands of sailors, maybe our kids or our neighbors’ grandkids, on a floating symbol with no clear strategic upside?

Risking American lives only makes sense when the mission demands it. If the mission doesn’t, then we should be honest enough to say no, regardless of who proposed it.

Let's ratchet things up a bit, suggest names for these new battlewagons.

BB-72: U.S.S. Bonespurs

BB-73: U.S.S. Melania's Titz

BB-74: U.S.S. Limbaugh's Butt

BB-75: U.S.S. Putin's Bitch

BB-76: U.S.S. Lyin arse

And for the record. If anyone sinks a US Carrier, they are about to get nuked.

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This is one of those scary moments like when they were needing to adapt to the fully automatic weapons of WW1. The slaughter was horrific because they weren't acknowledging the tactics had radically changed. I think we're about to see evidence of that kind of change. Probably with a carrier on the bottom.

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Agreed. Drone warfare has been a live-fire lesson in how fast massive structural dominance collapses once cheap, distributed systems enter the field. Concentration becomes exploitable. Redundancy, dispersal, and distribution stop being nice design features and start being design requirements.

The parallels to naval warfare are hard to miss: fewer massive nodes, more platforms, more autonomy, more layers of defense and failure tolerance. Big ships still have roles, but treating them as the center of gravity instead of one component in a distributed system is fighting three wars ago, not the next one.