By Eric Peters
Eric Peters Autos
December 24, 2025
Maybe someone should tell Trump that battleships are history.
Literally.
They became obviously obsolete some 84 years ago, when carrier-based Japanese airplanes sank several of them at Pearl Harbor. Those, of course, were literally sitting ducks. And they were all old battleships, dating back to WW I.
But the German battleship Bismarck was state of the art when she was crippled while maneuvering out in the open ocean, firing her main and secondary armament futilely at slow-flying WW I-era biplanes sicc'd at her by the pursuing British. One of these rickety old airplanes dropped a torpedo that struck the Bismarck's stern and crippled her by jamming her rudders. All she could do after that was turn in a wide circle. The British fleet that was chasing her caught up and methodically blasted Bismarck into a smoldering hulk.
Later in the war, the Japanese did the same to the British battleship Duke of York, which had scrapped with the Bismarck and her consort, the heavy cruiser (small battleship, basically) Prinz Eugen. The British battleship was also brand-new and state-of-the-art. It now lies on the bottom, courtesy of the Japanese navy. Ditto brand-new Italian battleships that were trying to surrender to the allies when the Germans sank them from above, using the Fritz X - the first "smart" bomb ever used in war.
Near the very end of the war, the mightiest battleship that ever put to sea - the Yamato - which was estimated to displace 70,000 tons (20,000 tons more than Bismarck) and carried astounding 18 inch main guns and that had the thickest armor of any battleship ever made - was sunk by carrier aircraft of the US Navy as it flailed helplessly batting at them with its mighty but essentially impotent armament.
The point being that battleships are magnificent as museum ships. Their mighty guns are awesome to see - in port. At sea, they are essentially useless - as weapons - because the range of their main guns is at most about 25 miles - and because their armored flanks can be holed and the ship sunk by missiles fired at them from very far away that probably cost less than the cost of a single secondary gun on the battleship.
It's the same, by the way, for the aircraft carriers that took the place of battleships as the pride of the fleet. A jihadi in a HilLux with a single shoulder fired missile can send one to the bottom. Big ships can flex power but - like bodybuilders - it is chiefly flexing.
So what is Trump thinking?
Does he even know what a battleship is ? Or does he just think they're really big and beautiful ships and for just those reasons they ought to be brought back ? For swagger's sake?
He says he wants to name them after himself, too. A whole fleet of them. He says is an "aesthetic" man - an interesting self-appraisal given his penchant to gold-plate everything like a '70s mafioso.
"They'll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built," says Trump. He says they will be - of course - "beautiful." A Golden Fleet. "I'm a very aesthetic person and I don't like some of the ships you're doing aesthetically," he told the Navy.
Their stealth tech is "ugly," you see.
What's beautiful, of course, are the billion-dollar golden contracts that will line the pockets of the builders of this Golden Fleet.
How long before Golden Caligulas replace dollars ? In case you're not familiar, the Roman emperor Caligula decreed his own feces would serve as currency. Are we really that far from that?
Probably not.
This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.