There's big news about the new Trump-class battleship, but there's even bigger and more important news about what's going on in the Pentagon under reform-minded Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. But first — some things never change — I must nerd out on the battleship news.
The Navy says it will now do what I said it should do.
When the Trump-class was announced late last year, initial reaction from naval enthusiasts ranged from an almost childlike enthusiasm to deep skepticism. I had a lot of the former and a little of the latter — detailed in a Thursday Essay for our VIP supporters — and my small doubts were mostly about the power plant.
Stick a pin in that thought. I'll come back to it in just a sec.
According to USNI News at the time, the Trump-class "design will also leave margin to add additional weapons, including directed energy, the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile and potentially a 32 megajoule rail gun."
My first thought was, "Not without a couple of nuclear reactors, they won't," and I wrote in that essay that the class "ought to be a nuclear-powered BBGN with 50 years' worth of fuel in its reactors. But that's just wishful thinking."
Sometimes wishes do come true.
The Trump-class was originally designated a BBG — BB for battleship, G for guided missiles as its primary armament — and this week, the Navy said it will be a BBGN. That's a capital N, and that rhymes with M, and that stands for Massive Power.
But what it really means is nuclear-powered propulsion, just like every submarine we've commissioned after 1959 and every aircraft carrier after 1968. We rock at nuclear propulsion, but the real reason the Trump-class needs the N is that those ships will have enormous electrical needs. You want to cruise at 32 knots and keep up with our aircraft carriers? More power. You want laser beams? More power. You want microwave drone killers? More power. You want a railgun? SO MUCH MORE POWER.
You want all of those on one ship? You can fuggidaboudit without a couple of nuclear power plants.
Turns out, that's exactly what the Navy will do.
“The nuclear-powered battleship is designed to provide the fleet with a significant increase in combat power by longer endurance, higher speed, and accommodating advanced weapon systems,” the Navy announced Monday, and just like I said it should.
The idea, at least in theory, is evolutionary lethality instead of another gold-plated — and doomed — Zumwalt-class science project.
If the Navy uses the same AB1 reactors found in our new Ford-class aircraft carriers, those ships will sail for 50 years (!!!) without needing to refuel or having to design a new reactor from scratch. If I had to guess, the Trump-class will borrow heavily from the entire Ford-class powertrain.
So the bigger story here — much as it pains me to admit that anything could be more important than a nuclear-powered battleship with fricken laser beams — is what's going on behind the scenes at Hegseth's Pentagon.
"The Trump administration's $1.5 trillion military budget request would rewrite how the Pentagon buys weapons," The Center Square reported on Friday, "forcing contractors to fund their own factory expansions and penalizing them for missing production targets – in a bid to fix what officials describe as a decades-long failure to turn American innovation into usable military capability."
"The historic, generational, and transformational changes we implement will move us from the current prime contractor-dominated system defined by limited competition, vendor lock, cost-plus contracts, stressed budgets and frustrating protests – to a future powered by a dynamic vendor space that accelerates production," Hegseth told the House Armed Services Committee.
Trump's $1.5 trillion defense budget request isn't just about spending more money on more stuff; it's about changing the way we spend that money to deliver more value to the taxpayer and more lethality for our services.
The design of the Trump-class BBGN is part of that strategy, leveraging existing technology while providing growing room for future technologies like railguns.
But let me correct something I wrote above and now must retract.
Even though the administration's defense spending reforms are just as vital to the nation as any weapons platform or missile/drone shield, today's big news is that the Navy finally admitted the way to make a 30,000-ton ship with 21st-century weapons even cooler.
You drop a couple of nuclear reactors in that bad girl.
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