The Death Star Administration

Doubling down on big and stupid

I’m still allegedly on semi-vacation. So I won’t do a full post today. But today is Star Wars Day — May the fourth be with you. And I find myself noting a disturbing resonance between the plot of the 1977 film and the ongoing debacle of the Trump/Hegseth Iran venture.

I assume that everyone has seen the movie. But as a reminder, in the climactic battle the Empire places its faith in a massive, expensive high-tech weapons system, only to see that system destroyed by scrappy rebels’ tiny fighters.

Guess which role America is playing in the current war.

So what has the Trump administration learned from its humiliation in the current war? Silly question. This administration doesn’t learn.

After all, the war in Ukraine had entered its fifth year by the time the U.S. began bombing Iran. Drones have turned the entire front line of that war into an ever-widening “kill zone”. So nobody should have been surprised by the lethality — Hegseth’s favorite word — of inexpensive drones in the Persian Gulf. Yet Hegseth and co. were evidently caught completely off guard. Many reports indicate that U.S. military sites have suffered far more damage than the Pentagon has acknowledged.

And Trump remains unmoved in his determination to build Death Stars — specifically, huge “Trump-class” battleships. In fact, Trump fired his Navy secretary, not because of poor performance in the Iran war, but because he wasn’t delivering the new ships on Trump’s impossible timeline.

As far as I can tell, there is an overwhelming consensus among military experts that giant battleships are as obsolete as, well, coal power. Ukraine sank the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship, with missiles early in the war:

Since then Ukraine has used drones, both airborne and seaborne, to effectively drive Russian forces from that sea despite not having a navy of its own.

There’s every reason, then, to believe that Trump-class battleships would at best be expensive pieces of junk. At worst they would be floating coffins for U.S. sailors.

And I do mean expensive. Current projections are that each of these ships would cost $17 billion. That’s not the cost of a whole fleet, it’s the cost for each individual ship. And if there’s one thing the U.S. military is still good at, it’s spending more than projected on weapons systems.

Even for a government as big as America’s, $17 billion is a lot of money. Each of these ships would, for example, cost almost twice the pre-Trump annual budget of the National Science Foundation, although the NSF, like all funding sources for research, is now facing savage budget cuts. On the other hand, it would be hard for Trump to stick his name on research grants. And hey, isn’t trading away U.S. scientific leadership in return for showy but worthless battleships what making America great again is all about?

Somehow, I don’t have the sense that the force is with us.

MUSICAL CODA

Not in a John Williams mood.