The ghosts of Billy Mitchell and António de Oliveira Salazar visit Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, graduate of the Wharton School of Business, has no grasp of mathematics or history.  He's become the poster boy for questioning the intellectual value of an Ivy League education.

And very clearly, one of the things he doesn't understand is shipbuilding and naval warfare.

Fantasy class warship, probably in the cruiser class, maybe, which the Trump administration plans on building as part of a "Gold Fleet", some naval marketing genius' terms for a vanity suck up project that will never get built, but which appeals to Trump's edge of death vanity.  The artwork heavily resembles a Revell model box for one of their cheaper modells from the 1970s.

2025 is the 100th anniversary of the court marital of Billy Mitchell.  Mitchell, a World War One aviator, accused the Navy Department and the War Department (which was more or less the Army Department) of “incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the National Defense.”  He had more than one point, but his big point was that the biggest ship could be sunk by aircraft.  The battleship Navy was horrified.

The British attack on the Italian port of Taranto in 1940 proved Mitchell quite right.  Pearl Harbor proved him right beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Mitchell was convicted in his court martial and went on to retirement the following year, but by 1941 he had been proven so right that he was lauded as a hero and the U.S. Army Air Corps named a bomber after him, the B-25 Mitchell.

Mitchell is still right, there's only one thing that's really changed. Aircraft have evolved.

They've evolved from mannered bombers and fighters to a new class of aircraft, the unmanned drone.  This event has been anticipated since late World War Two, and by the 1950s the British already assumed that the day of unmanned aircraft was about to arrive. The predictions on the speed of the evolution of such craft were wildly off, but the Russo Ukrainian War proves the day is now here, and not just in the air, but on the sea.  The Ukrainians have sunk or damaged about 24 Russian ships through the use of drones during the war and pretty much rendered Russia's Black Sea Fleet a nullity.

For decades now military theorist have wondered if the pride of the US Navy, the supercarrier, is actually obsolete. The speculation began as early as the 1970s when really good long range air to surface and surface to surface anti shipping missiles appeared on the scene.  The viability of such missiles was proven during the Falklands War when Exocet missiles in Argentine hands sank the HMS Sheffield and the cargo ship Atlantic Conveyor and severely damaged the HMS Glamorgan.  The Exocet went into production in 1975, and while still around, it's undoubtedly the case that it's improved over the last 50 years and there are other missiles around that are just as good or better.  The U.S. Navy started worrying about such missiles just as soon as they were produced, but the Navy's large supercarriers have never had to encounter them.

That is, in part, because we have not fought a peer to peer conflict since World War Two.  In spite of that, it's worth noting that the U.S. military has not exactly shown itself invincible in wars less than that.  The North Koreans and Chinese, the former of which only had an army from around 1946 or so, and the latter of which had just come out of a largescale civil war and which chose to deploy, to no small degree, troops who were conscripted out of the losing side of that war, fought us and our UN allies to a standstill in Korea.  Starting about a decade later we fought and ultimately were defeated by an Army that was quite primitive in comparison to our own, although a lot of that defeat was a morale issue.  Since that time we've fought and beat Iraq twice, but we were never able to prevail in Afghanistan, in no small part due to a major strategic miscalculation by Donald Rumsfeld, and our current Oval Office occupant ended up surrendering to the Taliban.

Now, of course, there's been very little naval action in anything that I've mentioned, but that shouldn't really give us any comfort. What naval action that has occured since 1945 shows that long distance anti ship warfare had improved remarkably since 1945.  The Argentines, not wanting to be exposed to it, didn't evey deploy an aircraft carrier it had during the Falklands War.  

Now, of course, people are pointing out that the awkwardly named Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has the most combat ships in the world, although its not regarded as the most powerful. That would be the U.S. Navy.  The U.S. Navy, with its supercarriers, holds that title, and it should.  But it can't be ignored that Ukraine has proven that sinking ships is now pretty possible with air and sea drones.

That's where the future of naval warfare is, not with vanity "battleships".

Indeed, that was proven in 1941.

The Navy knows that, but senior military officers right now know that if they want to keep their jobs they have to feed the demented monkey in Trump's brain.  And that brain isn't pegging out on the smarts meter by any means.  Statements by Donald Trump show him to be in the full grasp of dementia and raise questions on whether he was every very sharp.  

He's also incredibly vain.

And more than a little scared.

Being vain and scared, he's quite easy to manipulate.  Given the chance to name something after himself, and believe that it will be around after his body is rotting in its grave, which will be quite soon, he'll take the bait.  And hence the Trump Class of "battleship".

It'll never happen.

It takes at least two year to design a warship, and often multiples of that.  And then it takes another two to five years to build it. Trump no doubt plans on being living at age 90, but he won't be, and his demented brain will be reduced to complete mush should he live that long.  The Navy knows that, but the Navy likes to have money and ship projects bring in money.  Every since World War Two the U.S. military has engaged in acquisitions of things it didn't need for one reason or another, and the Army has proven that even a simple project like designing an assault rifle can take so long that a person who entered the overall task early in his career can retire before its done.

And hence António de Oliveira Salazar.

Salazar was the Portuguese dictator who came into power in 1932 and who fell into ill health and suffered a stroke in 1968.  The Portuguese government replaced him and he died 1970. But they never told him.  He was simply given glowing reports on how well everything was going and assured he was still running the show.

I'm pretty convinced that's more or less what's going on with Trump right now.

The Navy is simply going to slow roll this project.  Glowing reports are going to be given to the Demented Dear Leader.  The entire project will go swimmingly.  Meanwhile, others will report the same on the White House Ballroom.  Neither will ever be built.

Indeed, already the palace intrigue is on.  J.D. Vance is gathering allies.  Mike Pence is scooping up Heritage Foundation defectors.  Congressmen and Senators who are too tainted with the stench of MAGA, or who don't want to be there when Trump falls and takes MAGA out with it, are abandoning their offices to go on to new pursuits, readying themselves to reemerge cleansed from the inevitable bunker scenes that are already beginning to happen.