USS DEFIANT
January 25th, 2026
USS Nimitz has pulled into port for the last time. This gives the US 10 operational aircraft carriers. But not really. One carrier is always getting refueled, a long, and complex process. So, there are really only 9 carriers available. One carrier is based in Japan - thank you Japan. But that doesn't change the simple calculus that because ships need constant maintenance, and new crews need training, it takes 3 ships in the inventory to sustain one at some trouble spot. In fact, because things aren't quite perfect, over a sustained period of time it takes 3 and a bit more to maintain one aircraft carrier on station in, for example, the Gulf of Aden or the North Arabian Sea.
Do we need more carriers? Yes. 11 is a good number, it allows us to honestly sustain 3 forward at any one time, though in a perfect world I would like 15.
What about USS Defiant? I’ll begin by saying I am a fan of battleships. (And aircraft carriers, but that can wait till later.)
Critics have been quick to point out that the battleships will be quickly sunk. This is true, if they are operated by idiots. This is also true of the argument that hypersonic missiles will sink our aircraft carriers in the first 15 minutes of any war. If the carriers are operated foolishly, they will be sunk quickly. This has always been the case. If you want proof of that, read up on the war in the Pacific between 1941 and 1945. The “Miracle of Midway” saw the entire course of the war change, but not in 15 minutes, just 5, three IJN carriers lost in just 5 minutes.
Take a detailed look at the Japanese plan; these were tough, smart aggressive officers, not fools. But they developed an incredibly complex plan, split their forces, and committed their main attack force based on a poor reconnaissance plan, had weak intelligence, not enough support ships - refueling and stores ships, and an overabundance of hubris. The US had better intelligence - substantially better (perhaps the one clear advantage), a simpler, more focused plan, and some superb leadership.
Which is not to say that the Japanese leadership was bad. In fact, Japanese naval leadership was excellent; some of their leadership was better than ours, some of ours better than theirs. But the differences were small. Everyone knows the results, but the point is worth making: the IJN essentially lost the initiative - the holy grail of warfare - in just 5 minutes on a June morning, and never really got it back.
The Japanese had already landed in Guadalcanal and the rest of the Solomons, and on New Guinea, by the end of May 1942. In just the briefest span of time they lost three carriers (a fourth a day later) had their plans turned around, and seen their overall war fighting strategy stopped hard. In the few minutes they lost the initiative. They would never get it back. After the first week of June 1942 the Japanese were reacting, not acting. There was still a tremendous amount of fighting ahead and the Japanese would hold their own tactically. But the initiative was ours. The lesson here is that a different, more simple plan and they might well have won.
So, yes, the carriers could be lost in 15 minutes. But that isn’t a glaring weakness in the aircraft carrier concept, it is a glaring weakness in a given plan and the leadership that accepts the plan.
But what about USS Defiant? And the aircraft carrier?
To begin, great power navies have, on occasion fought each other. But for the most part they don’t, even under the most extreme circumstances. In the last 200 years major fleet engagements have been rare. During the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars there were a number of large engagements - 1st of June, Dardanelles, Copenhagen, the Nile, Cape St. Vincent, Trafalgar, etc.), but since then there have been only a handful of true large scale naval engagements with capital ships: - Tsushima (Russo Japanese War), Dogger Bank, Jutland, the Falklands (World War I), Taranto, Mers el Kebir, (Bismarck and Tirpitz were both single ship problems, the running down of Graf Spee and Scharnhorst and Gneisneau also were efforts to kill 1 or 2 ships), Coral Sea, Midway, the long series of battles in the fall and winter in the Solomons, the huge multi-engagement melee that was Leyte (which included the last battleship to battleship engagement), and the battle of Okinawa.
The point is that great power navies engaged in a large scale war at sea is rare, and, if you look at the potential loss of life, can be extremely violent. After all, if a ship has a crew of 1,000 and it sinks, depending on exactly how it sinks, virtually everyone can die.
USS Juneau, sunk off Guadalcanal, November 1942, had a crew of 697 when she was struck by a Japanese torpedo; 10 men lived. When Bismarck was sunk, 114 of her crew were rescued; 2,107 went down with the ship. Yamato, with a crew of 3,332, went down with 3,055 men.
So, what do great power navies do when they aren't engaged war at sea with another great power? Strategic presence, maintenance of sea lanes and control of lines of communication. If necessary, power projection ashore. The essence of this is, of course, the actual combat capability of the fleet. To fight and win a “war at sea” is the ultimate “coin of the realm” for a navy, the ability to fight and win a fight at sea against another great power, and then the ability to project power ashore, either by shore bombardment (with guns, aircraft and missiles) and the landing of Marines to raid, and in some cases seize and hold.
And once you have fought and won any large engagement, the ability to sustain and control the line of communication.
Which leaves us where?
It leaves us with the need for a “full spectrum” naval force. Does that include aircraft carriers? That depends; do we still need aircraft? Or are aircraft obsolete? If the latter, then no. If the former, then yes. If we need aircraft, we need aircraft carriers. Anyone who wants to understand how this plays out, even in a modern, very specific strike such as Fordow (Iran’s nuclear facilities) needs to take a hard look at the use of E-2s and EF-18Gs and what a modern air control and deep strike campaign looks like.
We need to build a new airwing that will include much more use of drones and a more comprehensive (probably much much more comprehensive) real time analysis and integration of all sorts of data streams, but that is a function of engineering the answer. All that points to a different, and perhaps very different, airwing on a carrier. But there needs to be an airwing. It might be mostly unmanned, it might include a dozen different kinds of drones, and drones of all sizes, some of them launched from ashore, remaining aloft for days or even weeks, others launched from the carrier, other from smaller ships (which we did for decades with battleships and cruisers), some from other aircraft, and some from small boats or even from SEALs going ashore surreptitiously and adding to the “info-sphere.”
But there will be lots of aircraft. And some of them will be strike aircraft (manned and unmanned) and all that means we need aircraft carriers.
Do we need a battleship?
State it differently: do we need a large ship, with lots of strike capability, sustainability, survivability, and room for command and control? The answer is clearly yes.
The fleet in 5 years and 10 and 15, will see growing numbers of unmanned and autonomous assets, in the air, on the surface, and below the surface. There needs to be command elements afloat to “orchestrate” all these assets, large and small. Small ships are going to be space constrained. And small ships simply are not as survivable as large ships. A look at what it took to sink some of the more modern ships built from the 1930s forward shows that large ships can be very hard to sink. And armor has gotten better and better (think of kevlar and composite armors), we understand compartmentation, fire suppression, and damage control better now than we did 50 years ago or 90 years ago. And size brings additional survivability. A 35,000 ton ship can be made very tough.
Is it a battleship? The answer is that it would be a capital ship, and a command site, and would be armed with long range strike weapons… calling it a battleship is quite appropriate.
Should it be armed with nuclear weapons? Absolutely. In a fight with a peer - that would be China or Russia - it is necessary that they understand that there are limits; if they use a nuclear weapon in a war at sea there will be US nuclear weapons “nearby” ready for use. That represents a deterrent that we do not have if nuclear weapons are not at sea. And make no mistake, Eisenhower was correct when he said - at a time when the US was spending nearly 10% of GDP on defense - conventional forces alone cannot deter a great power. Nuclear weapons need to be part of the equation.
And other ships? Certainly the Burke DDGs, certainly the frigate based on the USCG Security Cutters. But more.
We need more underway replenishment ships, to sustain the force forward.
We need tenders - “destroyer” tenders to provide maintenance and certain weapon support for surface units (the battleships, the destroyers, the frigates. And more submarine tenders to support the submarines - manned and unmanned.
Unmanned and autonomous ships, aircraft and submarines - many of them. These ships and subs and aircraft do not replace manned ships as much as integrate with and complement them. Missions change and expand, situational awareness improves, at sea lethality increases. War at sea and power projection ashore capabilities will improve.
If we do it right, perfectly, we might never use any of them in a real fight because everyone will be deterred. And a 35,000 ton ship, armed to the teeth with state-of-the-art weaponry, to include perhaps 25 nuclear tipped missiles, and escorted by 4 or 5 guided missile destroyers, a support ship or two, perhaps 2 or 3 amphibious ships and a battalion of Marines, and the knowledge that there are a score or more of unmanned ships just over the horizon, is a heck of a deterrent. And it would be nice to have more options than 9 operational aircraft carriers available at any one time.
Do we need to spend more? Yes. The 5% budget the President Trump has put forward is a step back to reality. Does all this need to be audited? Yes. That is part and parcel of this: we need to spend more but be tight-fisted in the control of that money.
But, we do need to spend more. Consider this: the most anemic defense budget of the Carter Administration, which contributed to his failed re-election bid, was ONLY 4.94% of GDP. We fell below that again in 1991 and haven’t spent that much since. The strategic wilderness that was the 1990s saw the DOD budget fall to just over 3%; following the surge in spending following 2001, we briefly reached 4.9% (Bush’s last budget), but spending has been dropping since then. As has been amply demonstrated by the Russo-Ukraine war and how we soon were dipping dangerously close to our limits on weapon reserves, we have spent decades underfunding the most obvious issues, such as ammunition and missiles, buying new airframes (Navy, Air Force, Marines, Army), maintaining ships, overall readiness, etc., etc. The President’s budget pushes us to 4.8%. It probably needs to inch up past 5% but this is the right direction.
All this sounds very expensive. It is. But deterring a fight is much cheaper than the fight, and failure to win a war at sea to a peer, the loss of sea lanes, the closing of lines of communication, would be an order of magnitude more expensive than the fight itself. Let’s not test that.
