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A ‘TRUMP CLASS’ FOLLY ON THE HIGH SEAS  
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By Phillips Payson O’Brien
December 27, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ Ukraine sees the future of naval warfare. The White House
doesn’t. _

, Roman Pilipey / AFP / Getty

 

Last week, Donald Trump announced a new class of U.S. Navy battleships
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which will be named after him. The Navy said
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that the new warship type “will be the most lethal surface combatant
ever constructed.” The president portrayed the move as a boost for
American shipbuilding and vowed to be personally involved in the
ships’ development. “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these
ships along with me,” he said, “because I’m a really aesthetic
person.” Yet the “Trump class” battleship program seems
optimized more to produce a scary-looking vessel than to address the
rapidly changing threats to American military power on the open seas.

Late last month, Ukraine’s military signaled a major shift in how
wars between nations will be waged in the coming years. Using the
country’s homegrown Sea Baby naval drones, Ukrainian forces badly
damaged
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two oil tankers off the coast of Turkey, in the Black Sea. Shortly
thereafter, another oil tanker was attacked
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reportedly also by the Ukrainians, in waters thousands of miles away,
in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Senegal. A similar attack
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on a tanker occurred earlier this month in the Mediterranean Sea.

All of these vessels are believed to be part of the so-called shadow
fleet of tankers that, despite multinational sanctions against Russia,
have been sailing the world’s oceans and delivering large quantities
of Russian oil. Disrupting the invader’s oil industry, thereby
starving the Kremlin of revenue, has become essential to Ukraine’s
survival, and the use of cheap weaponry to disable faraway oil tankers
is a crucial part of the country’s military strategy.

The conflict that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine
in 2022 has revealed the erosion of many post–World War II norms,
including on the high seas. After many decades of relative peace on
the world’s oceans, one can easily forget that civilian ships were
once a routine target of military operations during wartime. But
long-range anti-ship technology has become so effective—and so cheap
relative to other ways of attacking an enemy—that the risk to
merchant vessels will rise sharply. Even countries such as Ukraine,
which has limited means and minimal naval experience, can thwart their
enemies’ maritime interests in ways that have been almost
unthinkable for 80 years.

Deliberate attacks on civilian shipping were widespread in the first
half of the 20th century. Both world wars included major campaigns to
destroy commercial shipping, resulting in the sinking of many millions
of tons of merchant vessels. During both conflicts, German U-boats
attacked vessels in waters all around the world, with the goal of
starving the United Kingdom of supplies and forcing it to sue for
peace.

Over time, naval practices adapted to the submarine threat. By using
convoys—large groups of merchant vessels protected by British,
American, and Canadian escort vessels—the Allies were able to better
protect their shipping. An intense technology race occurred between
submarines and their pursuers. The development of sonar, radar,
long-range aircraft, and self-guided weapons helped tilt the balance
against the U-boats. Ultimately, the Allies destroyed so many enemy
submarines that the campaign became too expensive for the Germans to
continue.

Since then, Germany’s defeat in both world wars has served as a
cautionary tale to countries that might be inclined to target civilian
shipping, and the overwhelming dominance of the U.S. Navy has further
dissuaded most other nations’ armed forces from attempting similar
campaigns. Yet however much the threat to civilian ships has
disappeared from the public mind, a successful war against merchant
trade could be devastating. By one estimate
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approximately 90 percent of world trade is carried by ships. The scale
of this movement of goods and raw materials—without which much
economic activity around the world would simply cease—requires a
global fleet of about 50,000 merchant vessels with crews totaling more
than 1 million merchant sailors, according to the International
Chamber of Shipping.

In this context, what the Ukrainians have been doing since November is
ominous. In the next large state-to-state war, Russia’s shadow oil
tankers won’t be the only casualty, and naval drones such as the Sea
Baby won’t be the only culprits. Submarines, so consequential during
World War II, remain potent weapons for sinking merchant
ships—particularly in combination with other technologies. Anti-ship
missiles, launchable from the air or the ground, are more accurate and
destructive than ever, and have gained longer range. Aerial drones,
which have become ubiquitous in the war in Ukraine, both on the
battlefield and in the attacks on city and civilian infrastructure,
represent a further threat.

Merchant ships, using their own resources, cannot reliably defend
themselves against these technologies. Even if they travel in convoys
protected by warships and aircraft, efforts to fend off all drone and
missile attacks could easily fail because of the cost differential
between offensive and defensive weapons. Systems to attack shipping
are inexpensive, and equipping even large warships with sufficient
weaponry to protect them will be an enormous challenge.

Read: Trump’s vanity fleet
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The Ukrainians have used unmanned aerial vehicles to attack Russian
naval bases and logistics infrastructure, and their anti-ship missile,
the Neptune, sank the largest Russian warships in the Black Sea. Even
though none of these systems is as powerful as their Western or
Chinese equivalents would be, they have done extraordinary damage to
Russian naval capabilities.

A war between large powers, such as the United States and China, would
be devastating for worldwide shipping. But the fundamental difficulty
of defending shipping extends to warships as well. U.S.
aircraft-carrier battle groups may be the world’s most expensive
concentrations of weapons systems. They are made up of a range of
warships, including the carriers themselves—the newest of which, the
USS Gerald R. Ford, cost an estimated $13 billion. They carry large
numbers of F-35s, some of the most expensive aircraft in the world.
And they are also crewed by thousands of specialized sailors, who
cannot be replaced quickly. And yet, for all their extraordinary cost
and value, carriers are vulnerable to attack and must be defended
primarily by escorting vessels.

The Chinese would only have to calculate the number of missiles and
drones the U.S. could intercept at any one time and deploy more than
that—which, considering Chinese manufacturing capacity, would not be
a challenge. The balance of power in naval warfare is shifting from
the ships that seek to defeat outside attacks to the technologies that
do the attacking.

The implications in the Pacific Ocean are frightening for the U.S.
Navy—and offer one more reason, based on present trends, the United
States is poised to lose an extended war in the region. A strategy
that failed the Germans in the world wars is far more likely to
succeed today, and the impact on the global economy and power balance
could be profound.

Phillips Payson O’Brien
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professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, in
Scotland. He is the author of _The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin,
Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler—How War Made Them, and How They
Made War_ [[link removed]].
Since 1857, The Atlantic has been challenging assumptions and pursuing
truth.
When the founders of The Atlantic gathered in Boston in the spring of
1857, they wanted to create a magazine that would be indispensable for
the kind of reader who was deeply engaged with the most consequential
issues of the day. The men and women who created this magazine had an
overarching, prophetic vision—they were fierce opponents of
slavery—but they were also moved to overcome what they saw as the
limits of partisanship, believing that the free exchange of ideas
across ideological lines was crucial to the great American experiment.
Their goal was to publish the most urgent essays, the most vital
literature; they wanted to pursue truth and disrupt consensus without
regard for party or clique.

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* Naval warfare
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* Donald Trump
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* Ukraine
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* Russia
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* shipping
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