Dec.24

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Grift, Ego or Revenge? - The Follow-Up

Yesterday, we had items about the proposed "Trump-class" battleships, Bari Weiss spiking a 60 Minutes story about CECOT, and Donald Trump's grifty alliance with a fusion-energy company. Remember how Ron Popeil (RIP), in his infomercials, had "But wait, there's more!" as his catchphrase? Well, Trump really oughta appropriate that, because it seems there's always more to the story, and it's rarely good.

We are going to start with some follow-up on the battleship story, because that got the most attention in the media (both general and defense-centered), and also in our inbox. We were pretty skeptical that the U.S.S. Defiant, or any other Trump-class battleship, will ever be built. As it turns out, we should have been even more skeptical than we were. Here is a rundown of some of the problems that people who know what they are talking about (i.e., not Trump and Secretary of Playing Battleship Pete Hegseth) foresee:

• Cost: We put this one first, because it affects nearly all the other items on the list. The development of a new type of ship is a very costly venture, something on the order of $15-$20 billion. In this case, it could be more, maybe a lot more, because of all the new things that the administration says they want to try. Nobody, including Trump, seems to know where this money is going to come from. Perhaps he has fantasies of using the tariff money, but remember, he's already spent that money six different times. In truth, it would have to come out of other military expenditures (which Republicans in Congress won't go for) or out of spending on social programs (which Democrats won't go for). If there was a war going on—a real one, not an invented one in Venezuela—then the government might expand its borrowing. But there is no war, and no justification for adding that money to the balance sheet. Oh, and the national debt is about to pass $40 trillion.
  
  
• Shipbuilding Capacity: There is only one American shipyard capable of building a ship this size, the one in Newport News, VA. And the facilities that would work for this task are already in use for the construction of a new aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy. Either the carrier would have to be put on the back burner, which would not be a great thing for naval readiness, or the U.S. would have to lease or build some other large-size shipyard, which means spending even more money.
  
  
• Staffing, Civilian: The Navy's shipyards have also had trouble keeping employees, because the work is hard and the wages aren't great. Expanding production would mean finding more workers, which is not going to be easy to do. The government could increase the wages, but again, that means the price tag goes up.
  
  
• Staffing, Military: The proposed battleship would have a complement of 500. The ship it's supposed to replace has a complement of 300. Where will those extra sailors come from?
  
  
• Nukes: Because Trump and Hegseth are obsessed with projecting power, the plan is to put nuclear-tipped missiles on the new battleships. The first problem is that nukes require special staff with special training, as well as remarkably complicated procedures for handling the nuclear materiel. The second problem is that many countries will not allow ships to enter their waters with nuclear weapons on board. For both of these reasons, the U.S. stopped putting nukes on Navy ships back in 1991, on the orders of President (and Navy veteran) George H.W. Bush.
  
  
• Other Weapons: The proposed weaponry for the ship is mostly theoretical and/or unproven. In particular, Trump and Hegseth aspire to use railguns, which have already proven a boondoggle. This does not presage good things when it comes to either costs OR time to completion.
  
  
• Too Much Innovation: This may sound like a compliment, but it's not. As a general rule—and this makes perfect sense—the Navy has had the greatest successes with established weapons + new ship design. Such was the case with, for example, the very successful Aegis-class cruiser. It has had much less success trying to execute new ship designs and new weapons simultaneously. The Zumwalt-class destroyer is a recent example; that one went so badly that plans to build 32 of the ships were canceled after only three of them had been launched. Trump's new ship is even more ambitious than the Zumwalt-class ships were, so you can guess how well it would be likely to work out.
  
  
• Designed by Donald Trump: At the great unveiling, Trump said he would be participating in the design of the ship. Obviously, he knows nothing about naval ships, civilian ships, engineering, materials, weapons design, or anything else even vaguely related to the task at hand. That means that his "participation" will take the form of making demands, almost certainly unrealistic ones, that his underlings will try to accommodate, or at least appear to accommodate. That suggests many wasted hours, and many more wasted dollars.
  
  By the way, we can't believe we missed this yesterday, but the concept drawing of the ship that Trump used for his presentation has a drawing based on the assassination attempt, which will also ostensibly be stenciled on the ship itself:
  
  
  
  Boy, howdy, the ego on that one.
  
  
• Timeline: We wrote yesterday that no ship is ever delivered on time, and that 2½ years is unrealistic. What we should have written was "2½ years is completely, totally and utterly unrealistic." The best guess, from people who know, is something more like 10 years. Maybe 15. Maybe 20.

And then there's the biggest issue of all, which we hinted at yesterday: Battleships (although this ship would barely qualify as a battleship) are yesterday's news. They are not well suited to modern naval combat, and do not perform a function that cannot be better performed by existing ships (for example, aircraft carriers are a better choice if you want to bombard land-based targets). We got a solid analysis from a reader who is in a position to know; we're going to give them anonymity, for obvious reasons:

One thing seems oddly absent from the commentary on the proposed "Trump-class battleship": It isn't even a battleship (not that any modern navy needs battleships anyway—those were already close to obsolete by World War II).

Ignore the name and compare the specs on draft, beam, and crew to an actual WWII battleship. Metallurgy and armor have improved since the 1930s, but we still don't have Unobtanium alloys, and physics still applies. A long hull with relatively low tonnage, shallow draft, and a small crew is a thin, lightly built ship, not a capital one. Historically, that points less to Yamato and more to Northampton: state-of-the-art for its day, yet fatally vulnerable, as Tassafaronga demonstrated.

Numerically, the proposed "Trump-class" ship (≈840–880 ft long, >35,000 tons, 24–30 ft draft, ~650–850 crew) matches the length of the Yamato-class battleship (862 ft) but has barely half its displacement (65,000-72,000 tons), a much shallower draft (36 ft), and less than one-quarter its crew (3,233), underscoring that it is nothing like a true battleship in mass or survivability.

The renderings reinforce the point. This isn't a revived battleship concept; it's a scaled-up LCS. Given how the Littoral Combat Ships performed (their sardonic nickname did not arise by accident), it's hard to see this lineage as reassuring.

Worse, the platform would be exquisitely vulnerable to drone saturation. Stopping 99.5% of attackers isn't enough if the remaining 0.5% can mission-kill the ship. Trying to "fix" that with improvised overhead protection—the way tank crews now do in Ukraine—only deepens the problem. Tanks don't capsize; ships do. Making a top-heavy ship even top-heavier is not a survivability plan.

The vanity of the name is the least interesting part. The platform logic itself looks like a trap.

Every analysis we read yesterday echoed this basic assessment: The Navy needs drones, the ability to resist drones, and small, fast, maneuverable ships. It does not need a new semi-battleship, particularly one that surely will be a boondoggle. Either Trump is delusional, or he's just using military chest-thumping in place of Viagra, or he's trying to look "strong" for the base or for some other entity (China?).

Next up is the spiked 60 Minutes story. There are a few things to note from the last 24 hours or so. First, as we expected, Bari Weiss did know about the story, and allowed it to remain alive until just hours before airtime. She claims that she finally put her foot down because her "concerns" were not addressed. She says she is now going to completely overhaul CBS News' Standards and Procedures. That's an announcement that surely gives one confidence in the division's coverage, going forward.

It also turns out that the Trump administration WAS asked to comment, and did provide a statement to 60 Minutes, but the show's journalists decided not to use it. Here it is:

60 Minutes should spend their time and energy amplifying the stories of Angel Parents, whose innocent American children have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens that President Trump are removing from the country.

That is not a statement on a story about CECOT, it is propaganda that is only very tangentially related to the story. Excluding it was entirely correct, no matter what Weiss thinks. 60 Minutes is not in the business of giving free commercials to the White House. And if the White House was smarter, it would have come up with a statement that advanced its messaging AND was related to CECOT. This is what Ronald Reagan and his team were smart enough to do; hard to understand why there isn't someone in THIS White House who can figure it out.

Also, CBS is trying desperately to shut down all streams of the story, and filed hundreds of copyright claims yesterday. The problem is that if you try to keep people from seeing something, they want to see it all the more. And there are plenty of places on the Internet that are beyond the reach of CBS and its lawyers. Anyone who wants to see the item and hasn't already, this link looks like it will be evergreen.

And finally, just a couple of comments about the DJT/TAE Merger. Again, this whole story is flying under the radar, so there isn't all that much coverage for us to link to. Fortunately, it covers subjects in the wheelhouses of many of our readers. So, we got several messages yesterday like this one from L.S. in Bellingham, WA:

It should be noted that this is basically a merger between two badly over-hyped entities, not just a profitable company constructing an elaborate "questionable recompense" by purchasing a moribund social platform.

The fact is that ANY promise by ANY company that they are going to build a fusion power plant should be taken with the entire year's output of the Mont Belvieu, TX, Salt Dome.

A quick read of the Wikipedia page for fusion power shows that TAE and the rest of the industry are still a LONG way from being viable commercial power producers. The longest sustained reaction (by a FRENCH company, not TAE) is 22 minutes. This is a "not looking good" long-shot company figuring out how to "monetarily encourage" the U.S. government to throw lots of $$$$$$ at them, regardless of their actual promise.

We should also notice what dog is not barking. TAE management basically just devalued the original investors' stakes by 50%. The fact we are not hearing ANY squawking from them can only mean those investors had already given up on TAE succeeding, so... it's a grifter, grifting grifters, with the U.S. taxpayers left holding the bag.

That item was written by (Z), who knows enough to know that fusion has long been a holy grail in energy production, but is not up to date on the latest scientific literature, particularly the portion that deals with the current state of fusion research.

There's also another part of the story that was pointed out by many readers, including B.G. in Palo Alto, CA

There may be more to this story. TAE has connections to the Russian government. You can read about it here or watch an investigative video here.

TAE has existed since 1998 but has never built a working reactor or even made any revenues. One of their major investors is RUSNANO, a Russian state-funded investment company. Probably needs more scrutiny.

So, the grift gets griftier, the fantastical battleship gets more fantastical, and the shady behavior at CBS gets shadier. We told you there's always more to the story, and the more usually isn't good. (Z)