Building Battleships, Or Not

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, decades ago, I was interested in science and history, and atill am. A friend and I built model battle ships, made of cardboard,plywood,and plastic, duct tape and staples, and floated them on local lakes and streams. We then proceed to attack them with withering firepower,BBguns and rocks, in the heat of some naval engagement from World War One, Two, take your pick. In those days i [robably knew more about military history and weaponry in the dirt beneath my fingernails than I do in my entire aged brain today, my having forgotten more history than I ever thought I knew. Most old people know how that goes. Not that I'm anexpert on naval warfare past, present, or future, or that I know very much about battleships. But one thing I know, or think I know, is that battleships are obsolete,and have been since the inventionand deployment of aircraft carriers, Since nowadays we have the capacity to sink naval ships from nearly ay distance, from anywhere in the world,by land, by sea, or from beneath the sea, battleships, like aircrafitcarriers, are floating,sitting targets for drone attacks. Weprotect our aircraft carriers by surrounding them with their own personal naval flotilla, a sort of aircraft carrier bodyguard,amd, by keeping planes in the sky to surveil the surrounding seas, and by using surveillence drones, radar, and so forth. It isn't worthwhile, militarily, strategically, to go to all this toruble to protect big, bulky battleships, with limited range and firepower; you might as well build more aircraft carriers instead. Battleships were obsolete before World War Two, and the Germans found out in, what, nineteen forty, with the sinking of the legendary allegedly unsinkable battleship, the Bismark.My prediction is that Donald Trump's two titanic proposed battleships, the Trump One and the Trump Two, the first such vessels built by the United States since World War Two - will never be built. Cooler heads will prevail, slowly, gradually, America's top military commanders will come out of hiding and admit that the idea of actually building battleships in twenty thiery is insane, and enough politicians will be convinced of this inconvenient but glaringly blatantly obvious reality to scotch the idiotic Trump idea. This is a classic example of the emporer having no clothes, and everyone associated him is subservient to him, and nobody dares tell the high and mighty king that he is stark naked. If I can figure out that battleships are a total anachronism, utterly obsolete today and forevermore, then so can and so has every naval officer in the navy, and, for that matter, every member of every branch of the United States military. IN modern America,on tis paritcualr issue, we have literally millions of people perfectly capable of telling president Trump that he needs to start wearing clothing. Surely, of the hundreds of high ranking military officiers, and hundreds of members of Congress, somebody, anybody, can and will do precisely that. The idea of re-battleshipping the American navy will die perhaps a slow an dpaiful death, but die it will, for dead certain. If nothing else, teh next president will be sane enough to cancel this latest Trump insanity, just as our court system already has canceled so much of it. What we'll build is nuclear submarines, drones, computers, and lasers, but not battleships or muzzle loading rifles or cannonballs. Our coal and oil loving conservatives have some catching up to do on a number of different fronts.