By Sean Bielat, Founder & Managing Partner, Oscar Mike Venture Partners
Turkmenistan doesn’t receive too much press these days, and with the beginning-of-year rush, people can be forgiven for missing the 19th anniversary of the passing of Turkmeni President Saparmurat Niyazov, aka, Turkmenbashi (“Head of the Turkmens”).
During his life, Turkmenbashi gained international renown for his obsession with naming things for himself—including two cities, many schools, multiple airports, streets, and even a meteorite. He eventually erected a massive golden statue of himself, complete with a rotating base that allows the statue to always face the sun.
For those in a “Turkmenistan First” frame of mind, President Trump may have stirred some pangs of nostalgia recently, first renaming a memorial to an assassinated president after himself, and then a “Golden Fleet” anchored by, wait for it… a new class of Trump battleships.
Setting aside the Mericanbashi (“Head of the Americans”) vibes associated with naming a new class of naval vessels after oneself, it’s hard to fathom in what world the U.S. (or any 21st century country for that matter) needs new battleships. After all, the last U.S. battleships sailed the seas during the Bush administration–the H.W. Bush administration. And there are a lot of good reasons for that.
Diverting scarce Navy resources to develop new, expensive, massive, slow-to-build, slow-sailing vessels designed to carry technology that’s not fully designed or developed yet (rail guns, lasers, nuclear cruise missiles, etc.) is not the path to sustainably securing the United States’ modern maritime ambitions.
According to Newsweek, one gleeful Chinese expert from the People’s Liberation Army Naval Military Academic Research Institute even said, “[t]he large size of a battleship also makes it more vulnerable and potentially an easier target”.
Moreover, one wonders about the sagacity of putting nuclear weapons aboard slow, easily-tracked vessels; for decades, the current locations of the seaborne component of the nuclear triad has been among the United States’ most highly-guarded secrets.
What is not secret is China’s massive ship-building advantage. While the U.S. struggles to maintain a 300-ship navy (many of which are logistics and support vessels) and produces only about ten new ships per year, some estimates place China’s shipbuilding capability at 200 times that of the U.S. But even if the U.S. could somehow rapidly rebuild its shipbuilding capability, the future of maritime warfare is not multi-billion-dollar vessels loaded with thousands of sailors; it’s smaller, cheaper, often-attritable unmanned surface and unmanned underwater vehicles.
The sooner we begin to invest in unmanned and lightly-manned capabilities at scale, and the more we can integrate them into the existing technological edge currently enjoyed by our Navy, the better positioned we will be to support our Indo-Pacific strategic objectives. The real debacle of the President’s recent announcement is not its self-aggrandizing nomenclature, it’s its inexcusable misallocation of resources to technology of the past.
One of the perennial favorite activities in Washington is to fundamentally “rethink” defense procurement. The current zeitgeist is that private capital, primarily in the form of venture funding, will by itself create new companies and new technologies that will drive defense innovation. And to be fair, massive amounts of venture funding are flowing into U.S. defense tech startups, driving innovation and creating revolutionary capabilities. But private capital flows to companies promising the greatest financial returns, not necessarily the greatest strategic returns. Left to its own devices, private capital is much better suited to providing high-margin, high-demand software products, than lower-margin, lower-quantity, expensive-to-develop hardware—like naval vessels.
What we need today isn’t just more of the much-vaunted “demand signal” from government, it’s more direct government R&D investment in the naval capabilities of the future—a future that is significantly unmanned. And the Trump class battleship is sailing against the tide of that future.
Even among those (presumably few) who genuinely believe that a new battleship is what our Navy needs, is there anyone at all who believes that any Trump class ship will survive the next Democrat administration? Instead of investing billions of dollars in studies and plans and early cost-plus development funding for ships best-suited for the 20th century, let’s instead double down as a nation on our comparative technological advantages. If we have to aspire to a “Golden Fleet”, let’s at least focus on making it unmanned.
At the press conference announcing the “Golden Fleet” and its Trump class battleship, President Trump stated that he would be very involved in its design, saying, “I am a very aesthetic person”. While the merits of aesthetics as a driver of military vessel design are, at best, debatable, the need to maintain America’s technological edge on the high seas is not.
Let’s use this moment of focus on naval resources to resolve as a nation to invest government dollars into funding 21st century naval innovation and not just hope that private capital will lead us to the right answers, even while the Administration thinks of new things to brand.