The following was posted by Gary Clamurro, a retired Navy captain who I have known for over 40 years:

The Administration has announced the launch of a new class of 'old' naval vessels: the Trump Class Battleship. Is this a wise development for projecting US Naval power?

Disclaimer: Y'all will recall that my first assignment in the USN was on a ballistic missile submarine where stealth and silence meant survival at sea.

Big beautiful 'Gold' battleships are a sea animal whose time has passed. From the time of Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet (white because they were painted white, not for any other reason), nearly 120 years ago, the battleship was meant to be a visible projection of national power. Naval Air power at the end of WW II ended the era of the battleship. They are indeed big and visible and easily targeted on the 21st Century battle space at sea. Not good. We have tactical strategies in place to keep our large aircraft carriers out of harms way, and to mitigate the effectiveness of our adversaries' hypersonic missiles. The USN would need to do the same for each battleship.

The best fleet, the most deadly fleet, is the one that you cannot see, the one you cannot track, the one you cannot hear. The one that you cannot know when it is just off your coast and ready to launch hundreds of cruise, guided and ballistic missiles. Of course, every once and a while you need to demonstrate the deadly power of such weapons platforms: ask the Iranians about the effectiveness of 30 or 40 submarine launched cruise missiles.

And you don't have to sink a battleship (or any ship, for that matter) to take it out of commission. A well positioned Electro Magnetic Pulse near a vessel would destroy its electronics capabilities and render the ship useless for combat.

In a war at sea between or among nations with such EMP capabilities, size doesn't matter. There will be ship casualties. In my thinking it is better to have more vessels (especially submarines) than a few Big Beautiful Battleships.

Just saying.

Donald Trump's much-hyped new battleship fleet, named after himself, "will never sail," a group of experts told CNBC in a new report, owing to the outdated design that will make them a "bomb magnet" in a real conflict.

Earlier this week, the president unveiled a new "Trump-class" of US Navy battleships, which he touted as "some of the most lethal surface warfare ships" and "the fastest, the biggest, and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built." Despite his enthusiasm from Trump about maintaining "American military supremacy," CNBC on Friday noted the "glaring problem" putting them at odds with reality: "battleships have been obsolete for decades."

"The last was built more than 80 years ago, and the U.S. Navy retired the last Iowa-class ships nearly 30 years ago," CNBC explained. "Once symbols of naval might with their massive guns, battleships have long since been eclipsed by aircraft carriers and modern destroyers armed with long-range missiles."

The outlet conceded that Trump's labeling of these new ships with the outdated model name could be a "misnomer," and the actual ships might be more in line with modern sensibilities. Speaking to several experts about the ships, however, CNBC found that the "Trump-class" fleet is still out of step with naval realities, with Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, arguing that they "would take too long to design, cost far too much and run counter to the Navy’s current strategy of distributed firepower."

"A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water," Cancian said, also adding that "there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail."