the empire ruled by fools and recently a dementia patient followed by our current intentional fool; 

 

You’ve probably heard Trump talk about his “golden” fleet of new “battleships.” He says  they will be “the largest battleship[s] in the history of the world ever built”  . . . [they] would be made in the United States with US steel . . . We’re going to restore America as a major shipbuilding power.”

Well, that’s interesting.

Firstly because Trump apparently does not even know what a battleship is. If he did, he’d know why none have been built since the 1940s. They are obsolete.

A battleship is basically a heavily armored artillery platform. It is defined by its big guns, which are indeed impressive. The largest battleships ever actually built – Japan’s Yamato and Musashi – had the largest (18 inch) main guns of any battleship ever built. Both were sunk from the air – just as the famous German battleship  Bismarck was crippled from the air by cloth-covered biplanes sicced on her from an aircraft carrier. The latter became the capital ship of world power navies, because aircraft can hit targets much farther away than the (roughly) 25 mile maximum effective range of a battleship’s main guns. The last active battleships were the Iowa-class – all four of them now museum ships. If they put to sea again, they’d probably be sunk long before they got close enough to a target to hit anything with their main artillery. That is why, when they were briefly brought back into service in the ’80s by Reagan, they were extensively modernized with Tomahawk cruise missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles and Phalanx CIWS before being decommissioned again in the early 1990s due to high operational costs and changing naval warfare dynamics.

Trump probably knows – understands – none of this.........more..........