Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?

[Spekkio]

I'm not saying we don't need more and better ships... just that whatever hare-brained version of that which is conjured by Trump should (and will) be aggressively discarded as soon as Trump is gone. Whatever one thinks of the President, his ideas about most things having to do with the military come from a child-like understanding of mission and requirements. None of us should want politicians defining what our future capabilities ought to be.

Trump speaks in hyperbole like everyone else from NYC. It's part of his populism platform, and the media can't help themselves from latching onto phrases taken completely out of context and misrepresenting the truth. It's quite infuriating because a) I have to fact-check everything that gets put into a headline and b) if they didn't do this, Trump probably wouldn't be president right now.

This article is another example of that. First, Trump did not specifically say he wants a 15,000 ton warship, he said he wants to build a Golden Fleet. There's the hyperbole - taking something that is done on a routine basis and making it sound like it's his grandoise idea to save American prosperity. The people working in acquisitions (i.e. not Trump) are discussing the design criteria of the next DDG / CG, and it could be as big as 15,000-20,000 tons.

The fact that people continue to under-estimate him for his boisterous rhetoric is why he has been so successful in politics. Granted, the President shouldn't talk like a construction worker arguing about politics on the 7 train, but he does, and his base loves him for it.

Secondly, a 15,000 ton warship would be marginally bigger than the Renhai in tonnage, but since the authors of the article do not know that (and 99% of their audience does not either, including @Griz882), they use a bunch of colorful adjectives to exaggerate the project and make it sound ridiculous. By the way, both authors are young and are openly Democrat on their social media pages, which provides further motive to misrepresent the scope of the story, either out of ignorance or politics.

No one working on the next-gen DDG / CG wants to make the ship heavier than the absolute minimum it needs to be. But that minimum is going to be based on some kind of design criteria, like whether we want it to be capable of carrying long-range ASCMs / ASBMs like our Chinese counter-parts and what kind of unmanned systems we want it capable of employing.

And thirdly... whatever does come out of this will last longer than Trump because people serve in Congress for a really long time (an average of 8 years in the House and 12 in the Senate), and these programs live and die with the HASC / SASC, which are probably the most bi-partisan committees in Congress you can possibly find.

This is not a defense of Trump, it's a rant that the editors of the WSJ allow this trash to be published.

 

[Griz882]

Secondly, a 15,000 ton warship would be marginally bigger than the Renhai in tonnage, but since the authors of the article does not know that (and 99% of their audience does not either, including @Griz882)

Not sure why I was singled out for this since I basically wrote, in maybe 20 words, what you took a few hundred to do.

 

[Spekkio]

Not sure why I was singled out for this since I basically wrote, in maybe 20 words, what you took a few hundred to do.

Joke may have gone over my head but it seemed like you were making fun of Trump wanting to build an 1880s era battleship and not the article.

 

[Brett327]

The fact that people continue to under-estimate him for his boisterous rhetoric is why he has been so successful in politics.

He is profoundly ignorant on a range of basic topics. This has nothing to do with boisterous rhetoric. He is objectively the stupidest and least informed person to hold the office. He is functionally illiterate in the American form of government.