The problem with Trump’s battleships

OPINION:

The U.S. Navy may have finally found a way to get money for more ships: Name the class of ships after President Trump. It’s not clear whether it was the Navy or the president who named the “Trump class” vessels announced recently, but a little analysis of the proposed names leaves a lot to be desired.

The president said, “These cutting-edge vessels will be some of the most lethal surface ships. … They’ll help maintain American military superiority, revive the American shipbuilding industry and inspire fear in America’s enemies all over the world.”

The ships are supposed to be armed with hypersonic missiles, an electronic “rail gun,” and anti-aircraft and anti-missile laser weapons. They will displace about 45,000 tons, be almost 900 feet long and probably cost about $8 billion each.

There are some major problems. A “rail gun” is an electromagnetic “gun” that uses electric current and magnets to launch projectiles at extreme speeds. The Navy stopped using rail guns that were supposed to be deployed on USS Zumwalt class guided missile destroyers because they were found to wear out barrels after about a dozen shots. You can’t change the barrel on a cannon in the middle of a fight. Perhaps the Navy has figured out a solution to that problem.

Lasers and missiles can be used by Trump class battleships with considerable effectiveness. The problem is that the new battleships will be too easily seen by radar.

The Navy’s only significant attempt to build stealthy ships came with the USS Zumwalt and its two sister ships. The new battleships, as we can see from an artist’s rendering, will have two tall and relatively square superstructures. Their hulls aren’t designed to reflect radar signals to confuse an enemy. As a result, the ships won’t be stealthy at all.

Stealthy ships are not science fiction. Lockheed designed and built the stealthy “Sea Shadow” in 1984.

Ben Rich, the boss at the Lockheed “Skunk Works,” was the one who discovered how to make stealth aircraft. He wanted to build stealthy submarines, but the Navy rejected them as well as the Sea Shadow, despite the Skunk Works’ success in designing and producing the very stealthy F-117.

I was fortunate to become acquainted with Rich during my tenure at Lockheed in the late 1980s. He told me how he “discovered” stealth. He said the CIA used to send him translations of Russian mathematics and science journals. He was sitting in his living room one Sunday morning, coffee and a lit cigarette in his hands, reading one when he came across an article by a Russian mathematician claiming to have discovered a mathematical formula for determining the radar cross-section of an object.

As Rich told me, he spilled his coffee and dropped the cigarette as he rushed to the telephone. He called in his team and, after some tests, proved the Soviet mathematician right. The results were the F-117 stealth fighter and the Sea Shadow. Their successors are the F-22, still the deadliest fighter in the sky, and the F-35. Other companies, such as Northrop Grumman, which built the B-2 bomber, caught up with Lockheed.

Stealth technology has been our ace in the hole for more than 40 years. Its value has been proved again and again, including during Mr. Trump’s B-2 strike on Iran this summer. The Israelis also proved their value by using stealthy F-35s to knock out most of Iran’s air defenses.

Navy ships are trackable by radar and radar satellites and are thus too vulnerable to air and missile strikes. (This means the era of the aircraft carrier is over.) China, Russia and probably North Korea and Iran can track our ships. China and Russia are working exceptionally hard on better stealth aircraft. They are probably developing stealthy ships as well.

The Trump class battleships, if the artists’ renderings are correct, will be highly visible on radar. They cannot be if they are to survive modern combat.

The ships can be redesigned to be stealthy, but the Navy is apparently uninterested in stealthy warships despite the obvious need for them.

Stealth technology is not the “be all and end all” of warship design. The U.S. Navy must incorporate it into the new class of battleships and every new ship it buys, or the ships won’t survive the battles they are meant to fight.

• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.