Greg Trainor

Just concluded the Great Battleship Debate with @ZackCooper taking the con and me taking the pro battleship side. One thing we both agree on is the new Battleship will never be built under existing US Navy shipbuilding policies and procedures. What will work is a crawl, walk, run strategy. Crawl We build the first two battleships at Hanwha or Samsung in South Korea. This is politically impossible and would be legally difficult, but there is a way. @DOTMARAD is able to buy ships authorized by @SecDuffy directly from South Korea. It takes them 3 years to build a destroyer, but they can build an off-the-shelf fast containership hull in a fraction of that time. Take an existing 🇺🇸 MARAD design like the SL7 modified for modern survivability standards (e.g.,g. Double hull) and start production. Bring the ship to the US to install the deck guns and CWIS and have @anduriltech install weapons systems. Once completed, the US Navy has the authority to activate MARAD ships. Then the ship would be designed and weaponized by 🇺🇸. But we can even do better. It will take a few years for American shipyards to ramp up production of a new battleship. The limiting factor is labor. It takes time to train the workforce. But Hanwha has been sending Americans hired by their Philly Shipyard to train at their yard in South Korea. So here’s the plan. Require that 51% of the core workforce (contractors and specialists don’t need to all be American) in Korea working on the battleship be American. Then you would have a ship designed and weaponized in America that was built by Americans. Once the first hull is completed, the American workers move back to yards in the United States to continue production back home. This may sound outrageous, but there is recent precedent. In December, the USCG signed a contract to build 6 new icebreakers, but here’s the catch… the first two are being built in Finland as Bollinger Shipyards ramps up production for the next four. And there are some beautiful fast containership designs like the SL7 that could meet Trump’s aesthetic demands. The final ship wouldn’t be 100% what the Navy wants, but it could meet 80% of the requirements and be built before the end of Trump’s term. The question is not if doing it is possible. The question is whether “built by Americans” is enough for Congress or does a ship of this notoriety need to be built in America to be politically palatable? The bugger question is whether the Navy will accept a ship built to commercial, not full naval, survivability standards? If they look, I believe they will find that modern commercial ships are much harder to sink than anyone realizes. Compartmentalization to prevent oil spills makes them hard to sink, and new design software has made them much safer. In fact, despite firing thousands of missiles and drones at commercial ships, the Houthis and Iran combined have only managed to sink one. And that one took thirteen days to sink. The Houthis had to climb aboard and set explosive charges in the bilge to sink the others. Not a perfect solution by any means, but it is the best option for getting a big, beautiful battleship in the water while Trump is still president. Better yet it would give our own shipyards the time and workforce needed to design and build Flight 2 battleships within five years and Flight 3 nuclear in less than ten. All that said, it’s doable but @SECNAV @william_toti and @SecDuffy need to move fast. Time is ticking. P.S. now go subscribe to @mercoglianos’ YouTube channel and hit the bell to be notified when the Great Battleship Debate goes live in a few days: @wgowshipping?si=qDdviAErC6maBg3k" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@wgowshipping?…