Battleships, Body Counts, and the Collapse of Restraint

How Trump’s Golden Fleet fantasy, Hegseth’s profiling doctrine, and a hollowed-out chain of command are dragging the U.S. backward, strategically, morally, and globally

Good morning! It’s Christmas Eve, and the administration marked the occasion by unveiling a two-part holiday message: a moral confession about how easy it is to decide strangers deserve to die, and a retro-themed merch drop for warships. Peace on earth, goodwill toward men, lasers that wipe things out, etc.

Battleships were not retired because America lost its nerve or forgot how to build big things. They were retired because modern warfare made them liabilities. Size, once a proxy for power, is now a flashing beacon. In an era defined by drones, precision missiles, hypersonics, cyber warfare, and distributed kill chains, a massive surface combatant isn’t a symbol of dominance, it’s a gift-wrapped target.

Every serious naval strategist understands this. Modern navies are built around dispersion and survivability: smaller, faster, networked platforms that can absorb losses without collapsing an entire mission. The goal is to complicate an adversary’s targeting, not simplify it. A battleship does the opposite. It concentrates firepower, personnel, command-and-control, and prestige into a single floating object that every adversary will prioritize in the opening minutes of a conflict.

In April 2022, Ukraine destroyed Russia’s flagship cruiser, the Moskva, using relatively low-cost, asymmetric capabilities. The lesson was not subtle: you do not need a peer navy to neutralize a prestige platform. You need good targeting, modern missiles, and patience. Big ships die just as efficiently as small ones, often more so.

Retired U.S. generals have been saying this out loud because apparently no one else in the chain of command will. On television this week, retired Army Brigadier General Steve Anderson and retired Army Major Mike Lyons walked carefully, but unmistakably, through the reasons battleships were decommissioned in the early 1990s. Not because America went soft. Not because we forgot how to build steel. But because modern naval warfare made them obsolete. Aircraft carriers became the center of gravity. Protecting aviation assets became the mission. And even carriers themselves now operate wrapped in layers of escorts, redundancy, and caution, precisely because they too are vulnerable in a missile-saturated environment.

Anderson was blunt about it: large surface ships are now “big, large floating targets.” Lyons pointed out that the entire logic of naval power projection has shifted toward speed, dispersion, and survivability, away from prestige platforms that concentrate risk in a single hull. They didn’t sound ideological. They sounded weary. Like professionals forced to explain, yet again, why the lessons of the last thirty years still apply, even when a president decides he likes the look of World War II better.A battleship reintroduces everything the Navy has spent decades trying to avoid: slow maneuverability, predictable presence, massive radar signature, and catastrophic downside risk. Lose a destroyer, and the fleet absorbs it. Lose a battleship, and you’ve lost thousands of sailors, a command hub, and a psychological blow that reverberates far beyond the tactical loss.

Which makes Trump’s repeated invocation of China especially incoherent. China’s advantage is not that it builds bigger ships. It’s that it builds more ships, faster, cheaper, and at scale. Even Trump’s defenders admit the U.S. cannot match China ship-for-ship. So the answer, in a rational system, would be platforms that are cheaper, faster to produce, harder to target, and easier to replace. Drones. Submarines. Agile surface combatants. Logistics. Training. Maintenance.

Instead, Trump is proposing the opposite: a handful of bespoke, oversized, irreplaceable monuments to power that would take years, if not decades, to build, require entirely new infrastructure, and immediately become the most tempting targets in any conflict. Think of huge, gaudy Trump billboards flashing in neon “Strike here!”.

Even the technology Trump brags about undermines his own case. Hypersonic weapons, advanced missiles, and autonomous systems are precisely what make large surface platforms more vulnerable, not less. Rail guns and lasers sound impressive in a press conference, but they do not negate physics, saturation attacks, or the basic reality that defense is always more expensive than offense. You cannot bolt enough futuristic gadgets onto a giant ship to make it invulnerable in a modern battlespace.

Even the Navy doesn’t want this. What it wants, according to the same professionals Trump claims to support, is relief from crushing operational tempo, properly maintained ships, trained and rested sailors, and systems that match how wars are actually fought now. The obsession with battleships doesn’t solve any of those problems. It diverts money, attention, and political capital away from them.

Which brings us back to the real danger here. This is a bad idea advancing unchecked, because there is no one in the civilian leadership with the experience or gravitas to push back. A Secretary of the Navy with no naval or military background cannot credibly counter a president fixated on aesthetics and nostalgia. A defense secretary who reduces lethal force to a checklist cannot be expected to argue for restraint or realism. And a chief of staff who manages impulses rather than stopping them ensures those impulses keep becoming policy.

Because every Trump production is also an airing of grievances, this naval fantasy immediately morphed into executive tantrum-as-industrial-policy. Defense contractors, Trump complained, “don’t produce fast enough.” Their executives, he said, are making “$45 million, $50 million a year” while failing to deliver ships and planes on demand. Dividends are a problem. Stock buybacks are a problem. Factories aren’t being built quickly enough. And the fix, apparently, is that Trump will personally summon the CEOs, lecture them about their compensation, and inform them that if they want to keep making that kind of money, “they have to build quickly.”

This was presented as a kind of boss-fantasy monologue. Trump vowed to meet with defense primes to talk about “production schedules,” to tell them they need to stop spending money on “buybacks” and “big dividends” and instead pour cash into new plants immediately. The logic seemed to be that the American defense industrial base functions like a vending machine: shake it hard enough, yell at it long enough, and eventually a fully operational warship will tumble out.

But the most revealing part of the event wasn’t the imaginary warships. It was the moral framework being offered alongside them, which brings us back to Pete Hegseth, and the administration’s increasingly casual relationship with killing. During the Golden Fleet announcement, Hegseth stood beside Trump and described how U.S. forces decide which boats are worth destroying. No fishing poles. Multiple engines. Moving fast. In his telling, this was clarity, a clean, commonsense test separating innocent fishermen from “narco-terrorists.”

Across the Caribbean and along much of the Latin American coast, panga boats routinely shuttle workers, families, and supplies between islands and coastal towns. They are fast by design and often use multiple outboard engines because redundancy is survival, not menace. They don’t carry fishing poles because they aren’t fishing, they’re commuting. It’s not obscure regional knowledge, it’s basic maritime reality, well understood by anyone with actual experience in coastal navigation or humanitarian operations.

What Hegseth presented as a neutral checklist is, in practice, a profile so broad it collapses into suspicion itself. Speed becomes guilt, engines become intent, and absence of recreational gear becomes evidence. It erases the distinction between traffickers and civilians entirely.

What Hegseth did not say, but what recent reporting makes unmistakably clear, is how this logic plays out once missiles are already in the air. When profiling replaces identification, and ambiguity defaults to lethal force, and a boat explodes, survivors surface, and the same reductive framework is applied again, now not to determine who to stop, but whether those still alive deserve to keep living.

It’s the same logic ICE is using: racial profiling dressed up as common sense. Brown skin plus proximity to a border becomes suspicion. Accent becomes intent, and even movement becomes guilt. U.S. citizens are detained because they “look foreign,” just as panga boats are targeted because they “look fast.” The checklist doesn’t exist to discover the truth; it exists to justify action after the decision has already been made.

Once you accept profiling as policy, surrender becomes a technicality. Survival becomes defiance. Waving for help becomes failure to comply correctly. And the moral burden shifts, not onto the people wielding lethal force, but onto the victims for not performing innocence in precisely the right way, from the right angle, with the right number of raised arms.

We are talking about bureaucratized dehumanization, scaled up from detention centers to missile platforms. And it works the same way everywhere: flatten context, erase individuality, reduce human beings to categories, then act as if the outcome were inevitable.

According to a devastating investigation by The Intercept, U.S. forces did not just strike a suspected drug boat on September 2. They struck it, watched it explode, and then watched the survivors for nearly an hour. Two men clung to the wreckage of their capsized boat, waving as an American aircraft circled overhead. Six witnesses who reviewed the video said the men were clearly shipwrecked, clearly distressed, and clearly visible.

For forty-five minutes, nothing happened, except deliberation. Adm. Frank Bradley, then head of Joint Special Operations Command, sought legal advice from JSOC’s top lawyer, Col. Cara Hamaguchi. The question raised was not whether the men were alive, because they were. It was not whether they posed an imminent threat, because they didn’t. The question was whether the United States could legally kill them anyway.

Bradley later told lawmakers that the strike was deemed lawful. No one in the room objected. And so, forty-five minutes after the initial explosion, a second missile was launched, then another, and another. The remnants of the boat sank, and the men were erased.

The Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual could not be clearer: “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.” Under international law, the shipwrecked are hors de combat, out of the fight. You don’t need perfect compliance, or choreography. And you sure as hell don’t need “two arms raised correctly.”

But that was the defense offered anyway. A U.S. official familiar with Bradley’s thinking later claimed the men’s waving did not constitute a “two-arm surrender.” Four former judge advocates called that explanation “ridiculous.” Eugene Fidell, a former Coast Guard JAG and senior Yale Law School scholar, put it bluntly: “Waving is a way to attract attention. There was no need to kill them. We don’t kill people who are doing this. We should have saved them.”

Hegseth, for his part, praised the process afterward. “The deliberative process, the detail, the rigorous, the intel, the legal,” he said, describing the very sequence of events that ended with shipwreck survivors being killed for failing to surrender in the correct pose.

And the most damning detail of all is how routine this was treated. Bradley reportedly said he was “happy to take responsibility.” Hegseth later distanced himself, claiming he “did not personally see survivors” and had left the room before the second strike. Trump, who had posted edited footage of the attack on Truth Social and bragged it was conducted “on my orders,” later said, “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike.”

Hegseth had signed the execute order authorizing these strikes. The legal scaffolding, secret memos, elastic definitions of “affiliate,” after-the-fact justifications, was already in place. Pentagon briefers told officials they did not need to positively identify everyone killed, only show a “connection” to a designated group. That label, according to sources, was “quite broad.”

Hegseth’s “no fishing poles” test was only ever about permission. Permission to simplify, to dehumanize, and to keep killing even after the fight is over.

And just like the battleship fantasy, it advances not because it’s sound, but because no one in this administration knows how, or feels empowered enough, or cares enough to stop it.

Then comes the arithmetic that washes the blood away. Each interdicted boat, Trump claimed, saves 25,000 lives. Twenty-five thousand. The number is so enormous that people can only invoke it, not prove it. A hypothetical crowd of the saved erases the dead. Violence becomes humanitarian by assertion alone.

When Trump pivoted to land crossings, he dropped even the pretense of care. People coming by land, he said, will be “blown to pieces.” That isn’t policy. It isn’t deterrence. It isn’t strategy. It’s the pleasure of saying brutality out loud and mistaking it for leadership.

This is the confessional aspect that matters. Hegseth is telling you how the administration sleeps at night. He’s giving you the rhyme that makes killing feel uncomplicated. No poles, fast boat, bags, done. And Trump is telling you that in this White House, the threshold for state violence is not law or necessity or proportionality, it’s whether the story feels satisfying.

The battleships, absurd as they are, belong to the same story, not because they kill in the same way, but because they reveal the same governing impulse: certainty without friction, power without restraint, and a total absence of anyone with the standing to say no.

Tom Nichols, a former professor at the Naval War College, put it bluntly: resurrecting battleships isn’t just nostalgic, it’s strategically backward. The Navy has spent decades evolving away from exactly what Trump is romanticizing. Modern naval warfare prizes agility, dispersion, survivability, drones, submarines, logistics, and critically, sailors who aren’t exhausted. A giant, slow, highly visible surface platform doesn’t project dominance; it concentrates risk, into a huge “golden” target.

The Secretary of the Navy has no naval background, no service at sea, no immersion in naval doctrine or culture, and no lived experience that would allow him to look a president obsessed with aesthetics and nostalgia in the eye and say, this is a bad idea, and here’s why. Civilian control of the military depends on civilians who respect expertise and know when they are out of their depth. When that balance breaks, when the civilian leader neither knows the subject nor listens to those who do, instead of oversight you get indulgence.

This explains why the Navy secretary sounds interchangeable with Hegseth. Both men are operating without the grounding effect of deep institutional experience in the domains they now oversee. Hegseth reduces lethal force to vibes because he has no professional muscle memory for the cost of being wrong. The Navy secretary cannot counter a battleship revival because he has never had to think about what happens when ships meet adversaries instead of renderings.

Trump does not surround himself with people who can credibly say “no” in substantive terms. He surrounds himself with people who can say “yes” fluently.

Harry Litman’s conversation with Chris Whipple drives this home. In a functioning White House, the chief of staff is the person who walks into the Oval Office, closes the door, and tells the president what he does not want to hear. Jim Baker did that for Reagan. He stopped bad ideas before they became disasters. Whipple’s reporting in Vanity Fair makes clear that this function no longer exists. Even the most trusted figure in Trump’s orbit manages impulses instead of restraining them.

Which is how you end up here: a president free-associating about battleships like they’re classic cars, a defense secretary explaining killing as pattern recognition, and an entire administration translating urges into policy language instead of interrogating them.

This is the real story. It’s not whether the Trump class battleship will ever be built. It’s the governing condition that makes the announcement possible at all: a presidency powered by impulse, protected by loyalty, and surrounded by officials without the experience, confidence, or authority to apply the brakes.

And now we arrive at the endpoint of all this spectacle, where fantasy collides with reality in a way that can no longer be dismissed as noise. As Trump was unveiling his Golden Fleet, battleships as branding exercises, war as aesthetic performance, Europe was doing something extraordinary: publicly recalibrating its view of the United States as a potential adversary. Not just a rival, or a wayward ally, but an adversary. A “systemic adversary,” in the words of a French general, language normally reserved for hostile powers, not treaty partners.

European leaders are now openly warning that if the United States follows through on Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, they are prepared to defend Denmark’s sovereignty, even if that means war. Poland’s foreign minister reaffirmed the inviolability of borders. Emmanuel Macron stood in Nuuk and declared France’s unwavering support for Greenland and Denmark. The European Commission reiterated that territorial integrity is not optional, not negotiable, not subject to a president’s mood or distractions. Read that again. America’s closest allies are publicly signaling that they are prepared to fight the United States to stop it from behaving like Russia.

At the same time, Trump’s administration has been meeting quietly with Russian officials in Miami, discussing Ukraine’s “surrender,” while lifting sanctions on Russian and Belarusian entities, and imposing new sanctions on European leaders instead. Russians are welcomed, while Europeans are barred. Moscow is appeased while Brussels is punished. The inversion is total.

Trump talks openly about needing Greenland “for national security,” not for minerals, while parroting the same territorial logic Vladimir Putin used to justify invading Ukraine. His newly appointed “special envoy” to Greenland, the governor of Louisiana, chosen apparently because of a garbled understanding of the Louisiana Purchase, speaks casually about Greenland “choosing” the United States, as if sovereignty were a lifestyle upgrade. Danish and Greenlandic officials respond with disbelief: there was an ambassador, there were diplomatic channels, and now suddenly there is an envoy whose stated mission is takeover.

All of this is happening while the administration insists it is the European Union, through digital regulation and content moderation, that represents a threat to freedom. The same administration that shrugs at extrajudicial killings at sea now frames European democratic governance as censorship worthy of sanctions.

Europe sees it clearly, America needs to catch up. When allies begin preparing contingencies against you, deterrence has failed. When retired generals have to explain on television why your ideas are dangerous, governance has failed. When survival itself becomes evidence of guilt, morality has failed. And when no one in the room has the authority, or courage, to tell the president “no,” the system has failed.

The Golden Fleet was supposed to project strength. Instead, it has illuminated weakness: intellectual, moral, and strategic. A nation drifting away from its allies, toward authoritarian logic, guided by vibes instead of judgment, and increasingly comfortable treating human beings, at sea, at the border, or across the Atlantic, as obstacles to be removed rather than lives to be protected.

Marz joined me again last night for a rainy moonbeam vigil, paws tucked in, watching the dark settle in. I’m grateful to hear that many of you are joining in too, small, quiet acts of attention and intention, scattered but connected. In a moment when power is being wielded carelessly, when lives are reduced to checklists and allies to adversaries, that shared insistence on humanity matters. Our collective intentions don’t erase the danger, but they do mark a refusal to surrender to it. Points of light, held steady, intersecting somewhere in the dark sky. Peace be with you!