The Bunker: Rampant national-security nuttiness

This week in The Bunker: a self-inflicted hemispheric headache; buffoonish battleships; F-35 pickpockets taxpayers (again!); the answer, my friend, ain’t blowin’ in the wind; and more.

THE DONROE DOCTRINE

Veni, vidi, vici Venezuela

Nicolás Maduro is a thug, who stole his country’s 2024 election. Donald Trump is a thuggish president, who tried to steal his country’s 2020 election. Now Trump has likely thrust the U.S. into a war, without congressional authorization, never mind a declaration (not that the current crop of wimps on Capitol Hill would have brandished their copies of the Constitution and demanded a vote). This is hyper-unilateral 21st century imperialism, largely lubricated by oil. It is unlikely to end well. That is all. For now.

SHOOTING BATTLESHIPS IN A BARREL

Doubling down on “big is better”

The Navy has always been of two minds when it comes to war at sea. Submarines are the best, one hemisphere of the sea-service brain says, because they glide silently beneath the waves, hidden from sight and able to launch bolts out of the blue waters. Not so, counters the other hemisphere: huge aircraft carriers, crammed with warplanes, are the kings of the oceans, even as they look more like targets to growing fleets of drones and maneuvering missiles.

Today’s war-fighting Navy breaks down into three pieces: submariners (the bubbleheads), the surface-warfare crowd (the black shoes) and the pilots (the brown shoes). You don’t have to be a math whiz to know the aircraft-carrier denizens beat the undersea types 2-to-1. That accounts for the ever-pliable Navy’s swift embrace of President Trump’s call to go back to the future and build a new class of battleships. Unclassily, but not unsurprisingly, it has been dubbed the Trump class. These new hulls will be as vulnerable to attack as the carriers, lacking only the aircraft to defend them.

In an embarrassing display of boot licking even for the traditionally sycophantic uniformed U.S. military, the Navy declared “these new battleships will stand as the centerpiece of the Navy’s Golden Fleet initiative and will be the first of its kind providing dominant firepower and a decisive advantage over adversaries by integrating the most advanced deep-strike weapons of today with the revolutionary systems of the years ahead” (proposed new Navy motto: “Packing a thesaurus firing clichés”).

The Navy cited the “Trump class” battleship four times in its spittle-shine announcement, a stunning rubber-stamping repetition given the sea service’s long history of naming its battleships for states. Even more confusingly, the first Trump class battleship apparently will be named the USS Defiant, which suggests the Navy tradition of naming a class for the first ship of its kind has also been tossed overboard. And, stupefyingly, the new ship’s logo is based on an Associated Press photograph of then-candidate Trump raising his fist moments after a 2024 assassination attempt bloodied his ear (parody pales; perhaps USS Narcissist would be more apt).

Trump unveiled his fledgling bomb magnet — oops, battleship — December 22. “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me,” he said, “because I’m a very aesthetic person.” The Navy has infamously flubbed its recent warships, and Trump tapping himself to help is like having Star Wars creator George Lucas design the F-35. Sadly, you cannot make this stuff up.

Each of the $10 billion warships, inanely capable of carrying nuclear weapons, will displace 35,000 tons. That would make them twice the size of the Navy’s biggest current non-carrier combatants, but only about 60% of the size of traditional Navy battleships. Nothing new here. The service took delivery of its last battleship in 1944, two years before Trump’s birth (next up: horse-mounted cavalry for the Army, and dirigibles for the Army Air Forces!). Trump wants to buy up to 25 of them for a quarter-trillion dollars.

The move is counter to recent Navy planning, which has conceded the vulnerability of its big warships. The service has pushed for “distributed firepower” instead, deploying its weaponry aboard more, and smaller, ships. “This proposal would go in the other direction, building a small number of large, expensive, and potentially vulnerable assets,” retired Marine Colonel Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warns. But Cancian, like a slew of other naval-gazers, predicts enemy attacks will never sink a Trump-class battleship. “This ship will never sail,” he predicts. “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”

After spending billions, of course.

“THAR SHE BLOWHARDS!”

Winding down wind power

The U.S. military once embraced wind power so ardently that the Navy was reluctant to surrender its sails for the lure of coal-fired warships. But now — in a threat to the future — it is scuttling those very same ocean breezes, contending the burgeoning offshore wind-farm industry threatens national security. It is putting massive projects on hold, contending their towers and turbine blades could render U.S. radar unable to track invaders. This is what happens when the folks in charge can’t — or, just as likely, won’t — tell the difference between risks and rewards, and inflate excuses into reasons.

Strangely, this is one competition with China — Beijing is seeking to double its wind-energy production by 2030 — that the Trump administration wants to lose. Sure, it is shoveling more money into battleships (see above), missile shields, and nuclear weapons, but little when it comes to reducing the world’s existential reliance on fossil fuels. Like lusting for battleships, Star Wars, and atomic advantage, this is another back-to-the-future move by the White House convinced climate change is a hoax. The U.S. is becoming a petrostate.

If the U.S. had taken the same approach in the past that is now being applied to wind power, there would be no electricity, no computers, no Internet, no GPS, no nuclear reactors, no satellites, nor a myriad of other advances. National security is all about balancing risk, not zeroing it out.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently

→ Pete’s Planet Bizzaro

The Pentagon wants to reduce the rank and cut the pension of retired Navy Captain (and U.S. senator) Mark Kelly (D-AZ), for declaring that U.S. troops only have to obey legal orders, Defense Secretary Pete “Hands-off” Hegseth said in a January 5 tweet. “Paging George Orwell!”

→ Dollars and sense

President Trump is pressuring U.S. defense contractors to speed up weapons production by building new factories instead of repurchasing their stock, the Wall Street Journal reported December 22.

→ Bombs away!

President Trump launched at least 626 air strikes during the first 11 months of his second term, compared to 555 strikes during all four years of the Biden administration, Military Times’ Tanya Noury reported December 31.

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