Key Points
Trump’s battleship plan clashes with decades of U.S. naval strategy and technology shifts
Experts described it as a “prestige project,” a “bomb magnet” and said that “this ship will never sail.”
Even if it were technically feasible, the cost of building the battleship would be prohibitive.
Even in the battleship era, they had better ships for shore bombardment called “monitors” (after the Civil War-era ships named after USS Monitor that looked similar even though that wasn’t their purpose). A shallow-draft ship just large enough to hold a single battleship turret was a much more economical solution.