Today I learnt that the US military is planning to design and deploy a new class of battleships. They're to be named Trump-class battleships, because of course.
You don't have to be a military buff to know why this is stupid. I'm not. But in case you don't know the first thing about modern warfare, battleships are firmly a relic of the past. The last time they were a decisive force was im World War 2, and even that was debated at the time. By the 1960s, they were relegated to secondary fire support, if that, but were notoriously expensive and inefficient and required hundreds of people to even operate. In the 1970s and beyond, they were basically irrelevant. They were rendered more or less obsolete by aircraft carriers.
And the last time *any* navy in the world had even a single battleship in active service or reserve was in 1991.
Battleships have not been part of warfare for longer than a lot of people reading this post have been alive. Battleships have not *mattered* to warfare for longer than most anyone living today has been alive, period.
You might as well build new military blimps, except blimps are kinda cool. Battleships are the most spectacular waste of resources, money, construction time, and manpower you could conceive of.
How accidentally appropriate they're naming a project which will do nothing but waste untold amounts of money for no advantage after Donald Trump.
