It’s geriatric hype. It tells you how the administration is thinking about the Navy: in terms someone born in the 1940s—and who never refreshed their assumptions since childhood—can understand.
What we should have are floating, automated drone-production platforms that can be mass manufactured themselves and shipped to right ahead of the front for overwhelming the enemy’s sea-based defences (while F-35s take care of SEAD). Instead we get Popeye with a rail gun.
It's a storage thing. You can make it so that the parts fit together better in pieces, then you assemble the pieces in theatre during deployment, so you have more drones in combat per mothership.
It's not like taking crude, cracking it, then refining the plastics, yadda yadda yadda. It's more an fast automated assembly thing.
Inside of a submersible warship really is not the place to be conducting assembly of sensitive electronics, and just because you call it "fast automated" doesn't mean it's either of those enough to be feasible in combat situations.
Right. What's more likely is a box launcher in a shipping container. Both China and the US have prototyped that. Launch from anything that can carry a shipping container. Such as a small, expendable self-propelled barge.
Lots of weapon systems already require some assembly before use (for compact storage and other reasons), but we don't call that "production" of weapons.
The Arsenal ship concept[1] paired with the idea of "crew optional" ships would be inline with this idea and also integrate with the data link capabilities intended for the F35 (where it potentially fires missiles it's not carrying at targets it identifies).
The thing which stands out about VLS systems is the salvo fire capability of them: VLS tubes can launch an entire ships ammo complement in as little as 60 seconds or so. Which is a massive advantage because it means if a ship is targeted it can still potentially service every single target in range before it's in any danger of actually being hit.
Yeah, and the reason the arsenal ship proposal been shot down time after time, by many nations, is because when you actually dig into it, it's a bad idea.
There's a minimum tonnage needed to mount a big enough radar, have a hanger for a helicopter, and plenty of room for VLS, RAM, etc.
But past that, it's better to distribute your assets across multiple vessels vs building one dramatically larger ship.
It's far better to have 4x Arleigh Burke style ships than one behemoth that's 4x the tonnage.
Heck, this was true even at the end of the battleship era. Just look at how useless the Yamato proved to be. And it's doubly true now in an era of very sophisticated anti ship missiles.
Also, conceiving of this in terms of single platforms is also just totally wrong. We assemble surface action groups with a mix of capabilities that match the situation. Some of our Burkes focus on anti aircraft warfare, other's anti submarine, so we send a mix. And when they're on station each hull can be in the location best suited to its task.
So really you have to think about the whole package, and the arsenal ship just doesn't offer anything desirable on that basis.
That surely depends on the particulars of the anti-missile defense technology. If it turns out that bigger ships are actually more survivable because you can put more effective anti-missile defense systems on them, then maybe it makes more sense to put everything on one big ship rather than distributed across many small ships.
> The thing which stands out about VLS systems is the salvo fire capability of them: VLS tubes can launch an entire ships ammo complement in as little as 60 seconds or so.
And then it has to go back to base to reload. Reloading at sea is marginally possible. The U.S. Navy has demonstrated it recently, in harbor. But it's not done routinely with live ammo yet. This is a known weak point.
It's not clear when you would ever reload a conventional ships gun at sea either though, particularly on a modern transparent battle space.
It would still involve putting two or more ships in close proximity with heavy lift equipment for an extended time.
If this is close to the front it's a target, if it's not then you could reload VLS cells, and to do it your sacrificing the ability to put munitions on targets quickly which might just cost you the entire ship.
It's not even clear it saves you any reload time, since the only potential benefit is that shells are somewhat smaller then missiles, and even then once you account for magazine design and survivability I'd say the trade off is questionable at best.
You can helicopter shells and propellant onto the deck, then take them below for storage — as loading the guns from their magazines already happens.
VLS requires that you reload missile by missile at the place they’re fired from the top, which requires you have crane access to each VLS cell. You could replace the many non-reloadable tubes with fewer, reloadable tubes connected via loaders to magazines… but we’re starting down the path to re-inventing guns.
Helicopters don't have that much range - certainly way less then a ship does. So either you're close enough to a land base they can make the trip, or you're operating from another munitions ship - it's all the same problem.
And again, you're paying for all of this in the form of far slower firing guns with less range and precision.
Helicopters can operate off supply ships, 100km back from the conflict area and ferry munitions to your battleship that’s standing only 20km back. You can also use airdrops from cargo planes, delivery by small boats, or dropping back to meet the supply ship directly. None of those methods resupply VLS cells.
We’re also not debating a return to old guns — but to a modern version using autoloaders and shells equipped with guidance and range extension, to around 100km using modern techniques. Using barrages of all barrels, it’s closer to firing off waves of ~45 missiles at targets 100km away (9 guns, 5 rounds per minute burst).
The real difference is a battleship carries 1200 rounds instead of 120 VLS cells — and can replenish those rounds at sea. We gain that increased storage and endurance for decreased burst capacity, but remain over 45/min; excluding the VLS cells (which a modern battleship would also have).
The problem is 100km back just isn't very far, when missiles like the Ukranian Neptune have a range currently of 200km, and extended range variants in the works that push that to 1,000km.
That's a non-NATO, "country at war" system. Within NATO inventory you have the Tomahawk that dates to the 80s and has a range of 1,350km conservatively.
So if you needed to fulfill a long-duration shore bombardment mission against a non-peer opponent...sure, there's advantages to being able to loiter and reload.
But it seems abundantly clear that versus any peer or near-peer opponent, the closer to their coastline you get then the further in-land they can launch anti-ship missiles from - which they are heavily incentivized to do, and where the sky is also just getting more and more dangerous - i.e. a ship within 100km of a shoreline is starting to be in the range of medium weight drones, or autonomous surface vessels (which might deploy drones - as the Ukranians have been doing).
In your example, the issue isn't that the ship doing the shooting is in range: it's that the resupply ship is also in range and a better target.
You’re holding a double standard, eg, a carrier can’t engage from outside the 1000km+ of modern anti ship missiles either.
But that 200km is exactly my point: 120km back from the line of contact means that to hit it with 200km missiles, you’re within 80km of the contact line and the guns of my battleship for counter fire.
If I can force you to fire off your 1000km+ missiles at every transport ship that could potentially carry artillery shells or even dozens at my battleship to defeat its air defenses and sink it, then I’m accomplishing my goal of depleting your better weapons ahead of my main thrust. And surviving even minutes in a good firing position means raining down hundreds of 500kg+ glide bombs from the main guns.
A battleship is better than a carrier for “I’m going to sit here at 100km from the enemy and trade fire until they’re forced to go hard and overwhelm me”.
But the competition isn't carrier-based aviation, it's VLS cells on other platforms.
If you have more of them, then your ships can engage from further ranges meaning they can shoot sooner and faster while dealing with less incoming threats in response.
Because to defeat those incoming missiles you're going to need your own - which is what the Navy does now.
It's a comparative benefit problem: what's the floating gun platform doing thats worth the purchase price compared to just having more VLS cells which can do air defense, land attack, anti-missile defense and ballistic missile defense? Buying the gun platform is coming at the expense of that. If you can find more money to also have a gun platform, why not just buy more missiles?
The practical adversary the US Navy is facing is China which has large numbers of hypersonic ground launched anti-ship weapons. The fight never gets to shore bombardment, because either you deal with those threats or your ships get killed.
The problem is you're presuming that the adversary has a relatively few long range missiles - but the problem is, you have relatively much fewer ships then anyone has missiles. Killing the munitions ship is one option, killing the battleship - particularly at $15 billion a piece - also just takes the threat off the board. And you can do it before it possibly even gets in range.
Yes — I never argued against VLS cells, but against exclusively VLS cells. I agree with you they’re necessary, including in modern battleships for air defense.
What I’m arguing is that the threat generated by that bombardment capability — against islands in the ASEAN sea, against ports in China, etc — is necessary to force the kind of engagement you want. China has around 1300 medium range ballistic missiles, which is what we’re discussing.
Forcing China to overwhelm your single battleship (and support group, comparing BSG to CSG), depletes around 10-25% of their MRBMs, depending on their ability to penetrate your defenses. If they don’t make that choice, you obliterate the target and move on to the next one because you have 1200 glide bombs and the ability to resupply underway (similar to landing bombs on a carrier).
I don’t think we’re going to agree, but I appreciate you taking the time to give thoughtful criticism!
I read that as: it's a benefit to empty the payload if you're certain the ship is going to be sunk. Doing that in 60sec. prevents wasted payload or the opportunity for the enemy to recover the munitions.
Is that correct, or is it mostly to "get in quickly, get out quickly" then reload in safety?
The notion of a "crew optional" ship is a bit silly. It might have some utility for coastal defense: when it breaks down close to shore you can send a tugboat to tow it back. But I can't see how uncrewed surface vessels would be of much use to an expeditionary blue-water navy. Anything constantly exposed to salt water and vibration will break down. We're decades away from having robots that can do maintenance and repair.
Interesting. However, that machine is massive and specialized. I think we are a long way from generic robots being able to achieve something similar, let alone maintain a warship at sea.
Routine maintenance like cleaning, inspection, and consumables replacement is very easily automated. Breakdowns can easily be prevented with a combination of redundancy and preventative maintenance. Without a crew you can eliminate many systems that are necessary for sustaining a crew's long term presence which leaves a lot fewer failure points and a lot of room for redundant systems. With modular design you don't need an advanced robot that can fix an arbitrary problem, you just rip out whatever module contains the problem and replace it. It's unlikely on any given deployment that you'd run into a particular problem that can't be handled by an automated system and must be addressed prior to the next return to base, but if you did then telepresence robots, or a team flown over from a nearby ship in the battlegroup would likely be sufficient. If your ship is having a problem that is likely to cause the loss of the ship and a team of experts alone is not enough to fix it, do you really want to have more bodies on that ship?
People are not available though. Navies and militaries in all western nations have huge recruiting problems and that's before dropping fertility rates will shrink the entire pool of able bodied potential recruits.
"DoD IG: Army, Navy Miscounted Recruits With Low Academic Scores
The Army and Navy exceeded the legal level of recruits with the lowest acceptable Armed Forces Qualification Test scores, according to a report from the Pentagon’s Inspector General released this week.
The services, which are in the midst of reversing years of stagnant new enlistments, each created preparatory courses that would allow potential recruits with low AFQT scores to spend weeks studying under military teachers, in order to raise their scores and then move to boot camp.
While both the Army and Navy have seen success with the preparatory programs, helping the services to meet recruiting goals, following the Pentagon’s guidance on how to count these recruits may have violated federal law, the new report alleges.
Under U.S. law, a service can only have 4 percent of its recruits that score in the lowest percentiles on the AFQT, unless it gets the permission of the secretary of defense, which would bring additional Congressional oversight. As of March 31, 2025, the Navy exceeded that percentage, without permission of the secretary of defense, with 11.3 percent of recruits falling into what the military calls category IV scores, according to the Dec. 11 OIG report...."
That's a common misconception. The days of taking anyone who walked into the recruiting office are long over. US Navy recruits are, on average, regular middle class youths with a high school diploma or some college. Most of them could do fine in the civilian labor market if they wanted to.
The truly desperate people don't even meet recruiting standards due to criminal records, health conditions, drug use, low fitness, bad test scores, lack of a high school diploma, etc.
Almost. It's hype for geriatrics, or one geriatric to be precise. Think of it as the USS Trump Reacharound. It'll never get around to being built, but I'm sure the Navy will get lots of concessions from the Dear Leader for proposing it.
I read an article shortly after Trump's first win which said that American women, especially the oldest remaining generation or so of voters did not believe a woman could be President, and so they were anti-Clinton in a way their comparable daughters were not.
At the time I found this an interesting comparison to the UK. In the UK my mother's generation (squarely in that same bracket) voted in Margaret Thatcher†, the "Iron Lady" and so they know a woman is no different from a man in terms of potential to lead. Which doesn't mean (see Liz Truss) better but also doesn't mean worse.
So in the UK you could definitely put a strong female leader at the top of the ticket and expect to get the same response, and in the US that seems likely in the future but it certainly counted against Clinton and even in 2028 it's probably a bad bet (assuming that is, that the US holds a meaningful presidential election in 2028)
† Thatcher isn't much liked, especially in some parts of the UK, but nobody is fooling themselves by thinking she was incompetent or ineffectual, they mostly thought she was bad which is different.
It's been said for a long time that the first woman President of the United States would be conservative. The stated rationale was that voters would somehow see the conservativeness as cancelling out the "natural liberalness" of a woman.
Margaret Thatcher does not dispel that somewhat hackneyed notion. Nor do the last two women Democrats in the U.S. that ran.
I would like you to please consider that we conservatives would vote for a conservative woman because she aligns with our values, not because something is "cancelling out" her woman-ness.
Yeah, I think that after 2024 neither political party is likely to run a woman for president for the next generation at a minimum, and I think the voters agree.
(I don’t think that’s GOOD, mind you, but twice bitten)
Nikki Haley did very well in the primary against a more well known Ron DeSantis & Chris Christie. We have had multiple governors.
The only 2 that have run are not a good example.
A lot of people had strong opinions on Hillary that had nothing to do with her politics or leadership. A lot didn't want another 4-8 years of Clinton/Bush after 28 years depending on how you count Bush Sr. You could even add another 4 to that for Hillary's 4 yrs of influence as Secretary of State.
Harris wasn't popular in the primaries, many thought she wasn't deserving of the VP & she was part of an unpopular White House that was given a few ticking time bombs that they didn't properly diffuse. They also failed miserably to communicate with the public.
I don’t think Democrats will. I did think there’s a non-trivial chance of an Ivanka ticket depending on how the family brand is doing by then. He’s used to thinking in terms of nepotism and his sons have the charisma of floor wax.
Both of these two contests were really weird. Trump is an extremely unusual Republican. Hillary was someone Republican mouthpieces had been priming the electorate to vote against for the prior 20+ years. Kamala moved to the top of the ticket late in the race, in an odd move, replacing a candidate whose approval ratings had been in (historically speaking) “you will definitely lose” territory for months already.
Both races were pretty close despite this.
Also, I can tell you first hand that heartland, salt of the earth, common clay of the new west Republicans, the worst of the worst from democrats’ perspectives, loved Palin. Looooved her. She’d have done better among them than McCain. That’s among hardcore republicans. How the shit am I supposed to believe Hillary and Kamala being women is the reason they lost, given that?
I think the “lesson” of “well a woman just can’t win yet” is simply ignorant. It doesn’t fit what we’ve actually seen.
You're correct. That woman (Clinton) had no chance in winning, because Republicans had spent years hammering her in anticipation of her inevitable run, and many Democrats felt she was chosen before the primary, leading to much apathy. Had Harris had more time, she could've taken it.
Or, as you said, had the Republicans put up Palin, I think the world would look veery different today. I don't think there would've been as much of an appetite for the populist trump nonsense today.
> and many Democrats felt she was chosen before the primary, leading to much apathy
Well, they would have a good reason to feel that, because Debbie Wasserman Schulz basically engineered it that way as head of the DNC, and what do you know, less than 24 hours after leaving that position was the head of Clinton's campaign.
There was no way the DNC leadership was going with Bernie, and leaked emails later confirmed that - they just said fuck you to their membership's preferences.
> Had Harris had more time
Not coincidentally, number one Google search on Election Day?
And Hillary Clinton did get more of the popular vote—not that it actually matters in America's cockamamie system: not enough votes were in the "correct" places.
My gut feel has always been that removing the electoral college would hurt the blue team and help the red team. Logic:
The popular vote is basically split evenly today (the usual talking point, 2016, was 62,984,828 Trump, 65,853,514 Clinton). 2020 and 2024 had similarly small-ish margins.
So take 2016: if we’d had a normal election cycle, and then the day after voting said “hey guys let’s do this based on the popular vote!”, Clinton would have won. But that’s not how it would be; both sides would know of this change for at least the full election cycle.
So now you start with a roughly 50/50 split voting base, with many Democrat votes coming from big cities and many Republican votes from Middle Of Nowhere, Kansas.
You win the upcoming election by gaining votes.
Republicans go energize the voters in New York, LA, SF, Seattle, Austin, etc, who are not voting today because they (correctly) know their vote doesn’t matter. They maybe change some bit of their platform to appeal more the big city voters. They can pick up millions of votes in relatively few places.
Democrats have to go win votes from Middle Of Nowhere, Kansas. Or more accurately, 500 small towns in Kansas, to pick up a few hundred thousand votes. There isn’t nearly as much of a depressed Dem vote in red states, simply because red states have small populations (see “land doesn’t vote!”). It’s an exponentially harder problem. While Democrats are trying to convince Uncle Rupert that FOX is lying to him, Republicans are filling Madison Square Garden in NYC with closeted Republicans and telling them their vote will count for the first time ever.
I just don’t see how abolishing the electoral college doesn’t backfire on Democrats. How wrong am I?
Today, people probably stay home in safe states - if you vote Democrat or Republican in California - you already know how the state is going to be called. Same can be said for Alabama. Why waste your time for a sure thing?
Some 65% of the population voted last time. Last cycle, there were some jokes about how only votes in the handful of battleground states mattered. A popular vote policy could activate a lot of non-voters who suddenly felt like their voice could have an impact on the result. How that would shake up, I am not sure. I have heard that most republican voters are already participating, there are significantly more democrats who stay home.
The Electoral College strengthens democracy by enabling local-election-observation to be a highly effective safeguard against fraud and voter demoralization.
At my neighborhood polling place, poll watchers (including local professors, blue collar neighbors, and even occasional UN election observers) volunteer to quietly monitor the election process, verifying that no registered voter is rejected or harassed. With a day off work, any citizen can audit their precinct to verify that end-of-day machine totals match the state's certified results, and could alert the news of any discrepancy. Any motivated citizen can trace their vote's impact up to the state level.
This matters because the Electoral College locks in your vote at the state level by using it to secure electoral college votes. Should fraud occur in some far away state, the Electoral College prevents it from numerically overturning the electoral college votes your state has secured. This federated system is more resilient against local failures.
By contrast, adopting a nationwide popular vote means that votes don't count until they're tallied at the national level. At the national level, a firmware flaw in a poll machine in Hawaii, or a lazy Secretary of State in Arkansas can cause the system to accept fraudulent votes that numerically overwhelm the national tally without ever presenting itself in a way I could observe or report. Without the Electoral College, Democracy loses a lot of its "go see for yourself" and becomes too much "just trust us."
> The Electoral College strengthens democracy by enabling local-election-observation to be a highly effective safeguard against fraud and voter demoralization.
The Electoral College is a bigger source of voter demoralization than anything that exists in any modern representative democracy which doesn't have the Electoral College. (FPTP by itself is bad, but even other systems have FPTP, don't have nearly the degree and persistence of voter demoralization seen in the US.)
Like, I can see how one might utter this sentence in an alternate universe where the US was the only approximation of representative democracy that ever existed and where every commentary was purely theoretical with no concrete comparisons to make, but in the actual world we live in, where there are plenty of concrete alternatives and whole bodies of comparative study, it is beyond ridiculous.
You are correct, because the current implementation of the electoral college is currently synonymous with "winner takes all" in all but two states - ensuring no opposing party turnout in states that are a foregone conclusion. If the winner-takes-all system were removed but the electoral college were still intact, Democrats would never win another election.
I don't think that can be right. The Democrats have recently won both the House and the Senate. In such an election, if "winner take all" is abolished, how would they not win the presidency?
Because in states like California, Colorado, etc., vast swathes of Republicans do not bother to vote because their vote is overridden. The numbers don't work in reverse.
Just look at the county maps within blue states: these elections you speak of relied on those folks being entirely disenfranchised.
Of course it works in reverse. Plenty of Democrats are not going to bother to waste their time in California when the current electoral outcome is a foregone conclusion. Similar with Republicans in Mississippi.
If the rules changed to a popular vote where even "safe" states were up for grabs, I think there would be lots of previously uncounted "dark matter" voters who would activate and would significantly impact the outcome.
This math doesn't work in reverse because there aren't as many applicable people or relevant districts in the rest of the states.
Mississippi has far fewer total disenfranchised Democrats (in both absolute number, district count, etc.) than California has disenfranchised Republicans.
Without extreme gerrymandering, there simply aren't enough eligible-to-be-swung electoral votes to meaningfully benefit Democrats in rural states.
You do not need disenfranchisement, just apathetic voters who do not currently contribute. Right now there are ~23 million voters registered in California. 45% registered D, 25 %R, giving absolute numbers of 10 million D, and ~6 million R. Which you can handwave is 4 million Ds who know they do not need to contribute - their neighbor has their back to secure the state electoral votes.
Looking at the US as a whole, there are 44 million registered D with 37 million R. If you could round up all affiliated voters, Dems win the presidency every election if going by popular vote[0].
I know you being somewhat sarcastic, but the problem is the democrats put forward a checkbox-ticking uninspired candidate that had no business running for president - which I say based on her atrocious record in California and as VP. Her gender doesn’t factor into this.
Or in the case of Clinton, the party used undemocratic means to counter a political groundswell for a candidate they didn’t like, triggering an apathetic exit and no turnout for the most important voting bloc.
Most critically, the party seems utterly incapable of learning from these mistakes, and only doubles down on the worst decisions in the next election.
As it stands, we’d probably get a trans candidate (if there is one available) in the next presidential election. Which I’d want to celebrate.. but under present circumstances it would lead to an absolute electoral defeat. The Democratic Party leadership needs to learn to read the f$@!ing room, and put forward candidates with broad appeal.
Bernie is the closer analog to Trump in the Democratic Party, at least for this comparison. Trump is not a checkbox filling candidate by any measure. He was the protest vote against the system.
Even the second time, for different reasons. There was a lot of anger at how the Democratic Party kept the details of Biden’s decline hidden, and then did an emergency switcharoo at the last minute without a second primary. A lot of dem voters felt disenfranchised, and didn’t bother voting, or filed a protest vote thinking Trump would be as ineffectual the second time around as he was the first.
You might consider the field even for other reasons (which would make your comment something of a non-sequitur), but those adjectives certainly do not apply to Trump, regardless of what you think of the man and his politics. Trump very famously did not tick GOP checkboxes, and he has inspired a cultish following in a way that Clinton/Biden/Harris clearly cannot.
I blame the Primaries. The dogs choose the doggiest candidate and the cats choose the cattiest. The llamas and raccoons of Canidsas and Califelinia don’t even bother voting because the dog and cat candidates in these dog and cat voting states have always been and will continue to be in office term after term. The presidential race boils down to a handful of swing voters in purple Pettsylvania and Furrida.
It’s geriatric hype. It tells you how the administration is thinking about the Navy: in terms someone born in the 1940s—and who never refreshed their assumptions since childhood—can understand.
What we should have are floating, automated drone-production platforms that can be mass manufactured themselves and shipped to right ahead of the front for overwhelming the enemy’s sea-based defences (while F-35s take care of SEAD). Instead we get Popeye with a rail gun.