Analysis: Trump Administration's Proposed "Battleships" Don't Meet Technical Definition

Defining the battleship is slightly tricky, but the best version I have is that it is a large, gun-armed armored warship.

This proposal is certainly large, but it doesn't really classify as gun-armed, in that the guns are clearly secondary weapons, and there's been no discussion of armor at all.

So whatever these are, they aren't battleships.

Their closest cousin is the Soviet Kirov class, which likewise are somewhat hard to classify, but in the finest tradition of the USN, I'm going to go with 'Large Missile Cruiser' for these.

But the fact that they're being called by the wrong name, while personally extremely annoying, is just the tip of the iceberg.