President Trump announces a future battleship class in the navy. “Battleship!!” is in ways a marketing strategy. It appears to fill a role formerly met by retiring USN cruisers, the “arsenal ship” and the DD-21 “Zumwalt” land attack destroyer.
The new ship will weigh 30,000 tons, larger than current destroyers, and have the ability to add future weapons like electromagnetic rail guns and directed energy lasers … large warships outfitted with more powerful long-range missiles, even potentially hypersonic missiles, along with a larger number of a new small ship, the frigate …
Today the Navy needs a more powerful ship to better defend its carriers, which have become increasingly vulnerable, most recently seen by an attempted Houthi attack on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“You need something like two-to-three times the size of an [Arleigh Burke-class destroyer], you need some ships with that type of size so that you can have the defenses to protect the carrier, and the reach to be able to attack targets from a place where you can be survivable.”
Readers will recall there were studies to turn the San Antonio LPD class ship into a missile platform with greater capacity than the standard destroyer. However an amphibian hull would probably not be ideal to keep up with the carriers. Hence a new “battleship” platform.
The Houthi drone threat in the Red Sea has proved a severe test of some European frigate designs. The German Sachsen-class fired on and missed a friendly US drone due to IFF equipment failure. The larger Baden-Württemberg-class frigates avoided the Red Sea due to being underarmed.
Denmark’s Iver Huitfeldt-class was a fiasco. The missile system was offline for 30 minutes during attack; radar and combat system failures; ~50% of 76mm gun rounds exploded prematurely. Led to early mission withdrawal (cut short by two weeks), dismissal of defense chief for not reporting issues.
So possibly the thinking was the USN couldn’t use frigates because drones made everybody a high end threat.