By Scott Graber
It is Tuesday, early, and I have my coffee — Zabar’s Medium Roast — which came with a huge gift basket that included Hamantashen, Bobka and Raspberry Rugelach. This morning, I’ve also got the Post and Courier and news about a Trump-designed “battleship” that “will be larger and longer than a World War 2 era Iowa-class battleship.”
“They will be the fastest, biggest and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump says.
I was born two days before Hiroshima and therefore got under the wire as a “war baby;” not a “baby boomer;” coming of age in the shadow of nuclear testing and knowing the range and turning radius of the T-34 Russian tank.
Yes, there was post war prosperity and, also, near constant existential anxiety.
I also grew up in the military — a “dependent,” who moved from one army base to another every four years. Even though my father was in the Medical Service Corps, the places we lived were often near infantry barracks or parking lots with 155 mm artillery tubes lined up wheel to wheel as far as the eye could see.
For a time I was part of the Boy Scouts — our troop sponsored by Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. When we went to the annual Scout-A-Rama the focus, of course, was battlefield wounds.
Yes, we would create (using modeling clay, a small electric motor and rubber piping) a sucking chest wound. This would illustrate to the other 11-year-old Scouts how to properly deal with such wounds when they encountered lung-puncturing, sidearm-related situations in the future.
My own father was involved in burn research — the Army believing that in the future that 90% of battlefield casualties would involve burns. He would sometimes show me movies of what happens to pigs — pigs strapped into a decommissioned Sherman tank — when a small nuclear device is detonated nearby.
Although I did graduate from the Army’s Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga., I have never been in combat and have never witnessed what happens when a RPG round hits a M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV).
Although I am aware of the carnage that is taking place in Ukraine, I know I will never appreciate the mud, the blood and the fear that comes with the Orion and Sukhoi drones now in play in that horrific, hell on earth.
I say all of this to explain why — at 80 years of age — I am still fascinated, freighted and flawed by talk of “battleships.”
The U.S. Navy, as it happens, is also interested in ships but it seems to be headed in a downsizing direction. In contrast with the “larger and longer” Trump-designed “battleship” the Navy has announced the procurement of a smaller ship that is about the size of a Coast Guard Cutter that one might see docked in Charleston, S.C.
In justifying these new, smaller boats, the Navy said they will be faster and cheaper to build; and will be built in the United States. This should be very good news for the State of Mississippi where Ingalls currently operates a huge shipyard in Pascagoula.
The building of smaller, more agile, less costly ships is clearly related to the Chinese Anti-Ship Missile inventory now having operational ranges out to 300 miles. Two of these missiles, called YJ-12 and YJ-18 respectively, have an “evasive terminal sprint capability” that gives your average American frigate’s captain 45 seconds in which to launch his own anti-missile missiles.
At the same time our allies, the Japanese and the Philippine navies, are about to deploy their own “carrier killers” that will enhance our Naval Strike Missile currently deployed around Taiwan. These are supersonic anti-ship missiles giving the your average Chinese commanding captain a very limited time to deploy his own countermeasures.
I know Donald Trump has access to the best Navy thinking and I’m convinced that he’s not serious about his proposed fleet of longer and larger “battleships.” He is, rather, holding-up another bright, shiny, distracting object.
Trump craves constant attention and floating a “Great White Fleet” in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt will keep him front and center as an object of wonder, or ridicule, and frankly he will take either description.
I think he is serious about Ukraine and getting a “peace deal” whatever it takes. I think he is serious about getting another shot at a Nobel Peace Prize.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
