It doesn’t matter if you assume that large scale conventional conflict between the us navy and the plan over Taiwan is impossible in a world with strategic nuclear weapons, otherwise it very much does matter, because navies are built on the timescale of decades and the plans you make today very much determine the future you will live in 10/20 years from now.
Yes, the opportunity cost is the real problem with all of this. A navy takes approximately forever to build.
If we are extremely lucky the outcome of this will be increased shipyard capacity and refined shipbuilding practices just in time to switch back to building a multitude of actually-useful ships.
But most likely is that this ends up delaying the U.S.'s ability to build back its navy in time to matter, which is a tremendous issue given how we do our commerce and where some of our deepest friends are physically located.
If the navy diverts funds from the ddgx program for this, the usn goes from struggling to keep up with the plan’s expansion to being at risk of being completely outmatched in the late 2030’s / 40’s.
> The new Trump-class battleships will replace the Navy's previous plans to develop a new class of destroyer, the DDG(X). However, the sea service intends to incorporate the capabilities it had planned to employ on that platform into the new Trump-class ships.
I think there needs to be more awareness on how dire the navies situation is. Most Americans assume the 100s of Billions per year to the USN keeps us at some unparalleled level, but that doesn't seem likely to hold true.
The usn has consistently failed to procure any new surface ships other than upgrades to existing designs at scale this century.
In the early 2000’s, that didn't matter so much, but the loss of institutional knowledge, capability and manufacturing capacity is now at the point that it seems unlikely to be fixed without a significant amount of public interest and a huge amount of investment, neither of which seem likely without some crisis, at which point it will likely be too late.
Well before any "battleships" are built, we'd need to build up the infrastructure to actually produce them. This would presumably still be useful when the battleships get cancelled and we move onto a real program.
