January 7, 2026
Washington, DC
This week in The Bunker: a self-inflicted hemispheric headache; buffoonish battleships; F-35 pickpockets taxpayers (again!); the answer, my friend, ain’t blowin’ in the wind; and more.
THE DONROE DOCTRINE
Veni, vidi, vici Venezuela
Nicolás Maduro is a thug, who stole his country’s 2024 election. Donald Trump is a thuggish president, who tried to steal his country’s 2020 election. Now Trump has likely thrust the U.S. into a war, without congressional authorization, never mind a declaration (not that the current crop of wimps on Capitol Hill would have brandished their copies of the Constitution and demanded a vote). This is hyper-unilateral 21st century imperialism, largely lubricated by oil. It is unlikely to end well. That is all. For now.
SHOOTING BATTLESHIPS IN A BARREL
Doubling down on “big is better”
The Navy has always been of two minds when it comes to war at sea. Submarines are the best, one hemisphere of the sea-service brain says, because they glide silently beneath the waves, hidden from sight and able to launch bolts out of the blue waters. Not so, counters the other hemisphere: huge aircraft carriers, crammed with warplanes, are the kings of the oceans, even as they look more like targets to growing fleets of drones and maneuvering missiles.
Today’s war-fighting Navy breaks down into three pieces: submariners (the bubbleheads), the surface-warfare crowd (the black shoes) and the pilots (the brown shoes). You don’t have to be a math whiz to know the aircraft-carrier denizens beat the undersea types 2-to-1. That accounts for the ever-pliable Navy’s swift embrace of President Trump’s call to go back to the future and build a new class of battleships. Unclassily, but not unsurprisingly, it has been dubbed the Trump class. These new hulls will be as vulnerable to attack as the carriers, lacking only the aircraft to defend them.
In an embarrassing display of boot licking even for the traditionally sycophantic uniformed U.S. military, the Navy declared “these new battleships will stand as the centerpiece of the Navy’s Golden Fleet initiative and will be the first of its kind providing dominant firepower and a decisive advantage over adversaries by integrating the most advanced deep-strike weapons of today with the revolutionary systems of the years ahead” (proposed new Navy motto: “Packing a thesaurus firing clichés”).
The Navy cited the “Trump class” battleship four times in its spittle-shine announcement, a stunning rubber-stamping repetition given the sea service’s long history of naming its battleships for states. Even more confusingly, the first Trump class battleship apparently will be named the USS Defiant, which suggests the Navy tradition of naming a class for the first ship of its kind has also been tossed overboard. And, stupefyingly, the new ship’s logo is based on an Associated Press photograph of then-candidate Trump raising his fist moments after a 2024 assassination attempt bloodied his ear (parody pales; perhaps USS Narcissistwould be more apt).
Trump unveiled his fledgling bomb magnet— oops, battleship — December 22. “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me,” he said, “because I’m a very aesthetic person.” The Navy has infamously flubbed its recent warships, and Trump tapping himself to help is like having Star Wars creator George Lucas design the F-35. Sadly, you cannot make this stuff up.
Each of the $10 billion warships, inanely capable of carrying nuclear weapons, will displace 35,000 tons. That would make them twice the size of the Navy’s biggest current non-carrier combatants, but only about 60% of the size of traditional Navy battleships. Nothing new here. The service took delivery of its last battleshipin 1944, two years before Trump’s birth (next up: horse-mounted cavalry for the Army, and dirigibles for the Army Air Forces!). Trump wants to buy up to 25 of them for a quarter-trillion dollars.
The move is counter to recent Navy planning, which has conceded the vulnerability of its big warships. The service has pushed for “distributed firepower” instead, deploying its weaponry aboard more, and smaller, ships. “This proposal would go in the other direction, building a small number of large, expensive, and potentially vulnerable assets,” retired Marine Colonel Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warns. But Cancian, like a slew of other naval-gazers, predicts enemy attacks will never sink a Trump-class battleship. “This ship will never sail,” he predicts. “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”
After spending billions, of course.
INCENTIVIZING F-35 HANGAR QUEENS
No performance = no penalty = no problem
The Pentagon paid Lockheed $1.7 billion last year to keep its F-35s flying for 12 months, even though only half of them were available to fly, without imposing any available financial penalties. And why did that happen, curious taxpayers might wonder? Because the Pentagon and Lockheed “could not agree on the profit, fee, incentive fee elements, or performance incentive structure” associated with that 2024 F-35 sustainment contract, a grim December 19 Pentagon inspector general’s report concluded. Therefore, the contract “did not provide Lockheed Martin a financial incentive or a disincentive related to meeting the aircraft readiness performance requirements,” the IG noted(PDF).
The not-so-fine print: “The DoD paid Lockheed Martin $1.7 billion without an economic adjustment, despite the Full Mission Capable, Mission Capable, and Air Vehicle Availability rates not meeting the minimum military service requirements,” the IG said. “The average Air Vehicle Availability rate for all F-35 aircraft in FY 2024 was 50%, meaning the aircraft were not available to fly half of the time.”
This is what happens when the most costly weapon system in the world — built by the Pentagon’s biggest contractor — can only be maintained by that same contractor. In this elephantine pas de deux, the Pentagon and Lockheed are a pair of bureaucratic behemoths. Sloppy and slipshod, they’re propping up one another, gorging on their mutual parasitic symbiosis. Without Lockheed, the F-35 wouldn’t be able to fly even that anemic 50% of the time. Such “vendor lock” is tantamount to runway robbery, seemingly aided and abetted by a Defense Department that decries it. The Pentagon has painted itself, and the nation’s taxpayers, into a very costly corner.
“THAR SHE BLOWHARDS!”
Winding down wind power
The U.S. military once embraced wind power so ardently that the Navy was reluctant to surrender its sails for the lure of coal-fired warships. But now — in a threat to the future — it is scuttling those very same ocean breezes, contending the burgeoning offshore wind-farm industry threatens national security. It is putting massive projects on hold, contending their towers and turbine blades could render U.S. radar unable to track invaders. This is what happens when the folks in charge can’t — or, just as likely, won’t — tell the difference between risks and rewards, and inflate excuses into reasons.
Strangely, this is one competition with China — Beijing is seeking to double its wind-energy production by 2030 — that the Trump administration wants to lose. Sure, it is shoveling more money into battleships (see above), missile shields, and nuclear weapons, but little when it comes to reducing the world’s existential reliance on fossil fuels. Like lusting for battleships, Star Wars, and atomic advantage, this is another back-to-the-future move by the White House convinced climate change is a hoax. The U.S. is becoming a petrostate.
If the U.S. had taken the same approach in the past that is now being applied to wind power, there would be no electricity, no computers, no Internet, no GPS, no nuclear reactors, no satellites, nor a myriad of other advances. National security is all about balancing risk, not zeroing it out.