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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It's all hype, as the article points out. "Battleship", it's not. No mention of armor. A battleship is supposed to be able to withstand a hit from its own primary weapon. The British Navy had a fad for light cruisers at one point, "eggshells armed with sledgehammers". They did not do well in WWI and WWII.[1] Nor did the armored battleships. No Japanese or German battleship in WWII survived a determined air attack. Yamato, Tirpiz, Bismark - all lost to air attack.

But they looked really cool.

Anywhere near the coast of China, a warship is within range of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.[2] Lots of them. If there's a war over Taiwan, the Taiwan Strait will be a no-go zone for US warships. Being near a hostile coast held by someone with modern weapons is death to a navy today. The sinking of the Moskva was the first demonstration of this, and Ukraine has since taken out about eight more Russian warships and many smaller craft, using various missiles and drones.

[1] https://hmshood.org.uk/history/bcorigins.htm

[2] https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/china-s-df-27-miss...

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> It's all hype

It’s geriatric hype. It tells you how the administration is thinking about the Navy: in terms someone born in the 1940s—and who never refreshed their assumptions since childhood—can understand.

What we should have are floating, automated drone-production platforms that can be mass manufactured themselves and shipped to right ahead of the front for overwhelming the enemy’s sea-based defences (while F-35s take care of SEAD). Instead we get Popeye with a rail gun.

The Arsenal ship concept[1] paired with the idea of "crew optional" ships would be inline with this idea and also integrate with the data link capabilities intended for the F35 (where it potentially fires missiles it's not carrying at targets it identifies).

The thing which stands out about VLS systems is the salvo fire capability of them: VLS tubes can launch an entire ships ammo complement in as little as 60 seconds or so. Which is a massive advantage because it means if a ship is targeted it can still potentially service every single target in range before it's in any danger of actually being hit.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_ship

Yeah, and the reason the arsenal ship proposal been shot down time after time, by many nations, is because when you actually dig into it, it's a bad idea.

There's a minimum tonnage needed to mount a big enough radar, have a hanger for a helicopter, and plenty of room for VLS, RAM, etc.

But past that, it's better to distribute your assets across multiple vessels vs building one dramatically larger ship.

It's far better to have 4x Arleigh Burke style ships than one behemoth that's 4x the tonnage.

Heck, this was true even at the end of the battleship era. Just look at how useless the Yamato proved to be. And it's doubly true now in an era of very sophisticated anti ship missiles.

Also, conceiving of this in terms of single platforms is also just totally wrong. We assemble surface action groups with a mix of capabilities that match the situation. Some of our Burkes focus on anti aircraft warfare, other's anti submarine, so we send a mix. And when they're on station each hull can be in the location best suited to its task.

So really you have to think about the whole package, and the arsenal ship just doesn't offer anything desirable on that basis.

That surely depends on the particulars of the anti-missile defense technology. If it turns out that bigger ships are actually more survivable because you can put more effective anti-missile defense systems on them, then maybe it makes more sense to put everything on one big ship rather than distributed across many small ships.

> The thing which stands out about VLS systems is the salvo fire capability of them: VLS tubes can launch an entire ships ammo complement in as little as 60 seconds or so.

And then it has to go back to base to reload. Reloading at sea is marginally possible. The U.S. Navy has demonstrated it recently, in harbor. But it's not done routinely with live ammo yet. This is a known weak point.

It's not clear when you would ever reload a conventional ships gun at sea either though, particularly on a modern transparent battle space.

It would still involve putting two or more ships in close proximity with heavy lift equipment for an extended time.

If this is close to the front it's a target, if it's not then you could reload VLS cells, and to do it your sacrificing the ability to put munitions on targets quickly which might just cost you the entire ship.

It's not even clear it saves you any reload time, since the only potential benefit is that shells are somewhat smaller then missiles, and even then once you account for magazine design and survivability I'd say the trade off is questionable at best.

You can helicopter shells and propellant onto the deck, then take them below for storage — as loading the guns from their magazines already happens.

VLS requires that you reload missile by missile at the place they’re fired from the top, which requires you have crane access to each VLS cell. You could replace the many non-reloadable tubes with fewer, reloadable tubes connected via loaders to magazines… but we’re starting down the path to re-inventing guns.

Helicopters don't have that much range - certainly way less then a ship does. So either you're close enough to a land base they can make the trip, or you're operating from another munitions ship - it's all the same problem.

And again, you're paying for all of this in the form of far slower firing guns with less range and precision.

Helicopters can operate off supply ships, 100km back from the conflict area and ferry munitions to your battleship that’s standing only 20km back. You can also use airdrops from cargo planes, delivery by small boats, or dropping back to meet the supply ship directly. None of those methods resupply VLS cells.

We’re also not debating a return to old guns — but to a modern version using autoloaders and shells equipped with guidance and range extension, to around 100km using modern techniques. Using barrages of all barrels, it’s closer to firing off waves of ~45 missiles at targets 100km away (9 guns, 5 rounds per minute burst).

The real difference is a battleship carries 1200 rounds instead of 120 VLS cells — and can replenish those rounds at sea. We gain that increased storage and endurance for decreased burst capacity, but remain over 45/min; excluding the VLS cells (which a modern battleship would also have).

The problem is 100km back just isn't very far, when missiles like the Ukranian Neptune have a range currently of 200km, and extended range variants in the works that push that to 1,000km.

That's a non-NATO, "country at war" system. Within NATO inventory you have the Tomahawk that dates to the 80s and has a range of 1,350km conservatively.

So if you needed to fulfill a long-duration shore bombardment mission against a non-peer opponent...sure, there's advantages to being able to loiter and reload.

But it seems abundantly clear that versus any peer or near-peer opponent, the closer to their coastline you get then the further in-land they can launch anti-ship missiles from - which they are heavily incentivized to do, and where the sky is also just getting more and more dangerous - i.e. a ship within 100km of a shoreline is starting to be in the range of medium weight drones, or autonomous surface vessels (which might deploy drones - as the Ukranians have been doing).

In your example, the issue isn't that the ship doing the shooting is in range: it's that the resupply ship is also in range and a better target.

You’re holding a double standard, eg, a carrier can’t engage from outside the 1000km+ of modern anti ship missiles either.

But that 200km is exactly my point: 120km back from the line of contact means that to hit it with 200km missiles, you’re within 80km of the contact line and the guns of my battleship for counter fire.

If I can force you to fire off your 1000km+ missiles at every transport ship that could potentially carry artillery shells or even dozens at my battleship to defeat its air defenses and sink it, then I’m accomplishing my goal of depleting your better weapons ahead of my main thrust. And surviving even minutes in a good firing position means raining down hundreds of 500kg+ glide bombs from the main guns.

A battleship is better than a carrier for “I’m going to sit here at 100km from the enemy and trade fire until they’re forced to go hard and overwhelm me”.

But the competition isn't carrier-based aviation, it's VLS cells on other platforms.

If you have more of them, then your ships can engage from further ranges meaning they can shoot sooner and faster while dealing with less incoming threats in response.

Because to defeat those incoming missiles you're going to need your own - which is what the Navy does now.

It's a comparative benefit problem: what's the floating gun platform doing thats worth the purchase price compared to just having more VLS cells which can do air defense, land attack, anti-missile defense and ballistic missile defense? Buying the gun platform is coming at the expense of that. If you can find more money to also have a gun platform, why not just buy more missiles?

The practical adversary the US Navy is facing is China which has large numbers of hypersonic ground launched anti-ship weapons. The fight never gets to shore bombardment, because either you deal with those threats or your ships get killed.

The problem is you're presuming that the adversary has a relatively few long range missiles - but the problem is, you have relatively much fewer ships then anyone has missiles. Killing the munitions ship is one option, killing the battleship - particularly at $15 billion a piece - also just takes the threat off the board. And you can do it before it possibly even gets in range.

Yes — I never argued against VLS cells, but against exclusively VLS cells. I agree with you they’re necessary, including in modern battleships for air defense.

What I’m arguing is that the threat generated by that bombardment capability — against islands in the ASEAN sea, against ports in China, etc — is necessary to force the kind of engagement you want. China has around 1300 medium range ballistic missiles, which is what we’re discussing.

Forcing China to overwhelm your single battleship (and support group, comparing BSG to CSG), depletes around 10-25% of their MRBMs, depending on their ability to penetrate your defenses. If they don’t make that choice, you obliterate the target and move on to the next one because you have 1200 glide bombs and the ability to resupply underway (similar to landing bombs on a carrier).

I don’t think we’re going to agree, but I appreciate you taking the time to give thoughtful criticism!

I read that as: it's a benefit to empty the payload if you're certain the ship is going to be sunk. Doing that in 60sec. prevents wasted payload or the opportunity for the enemy to recover the munitions.

Is that correct, or is it mostly to "get in quickly, get out quickly" then reload in safety?

The notion of a "crew optional" ship is a bit silly. It might have some utility for coastal defense: when it breaks down close to shore you can send a tugboat to tow it back. But I can't see how uncrewed surface vessels would be of much use to an expeditionary blue-water navy. Anything constantly exposed to salt water and vibration will break down. We're decades away from having robots that can do maintenance and repair.

Routine maintenance like cleaning, inspection, and consumables replacement is very easily automated. Breakdowns can easily be prevented with a combination of redundancy and preventative maintenance. Without a crew you can eliminate many systems that are necessary for sustaining a crew's long term presence which leaves a lot fewer failure points and a lot of room for redundant systems. With modular design you don't need an advanced robot that can fix an arbitrary problem, you just rip out whatever module contains the problem and replace it. It's unlikely on any given deployment that you'd run into a particular problem that can't be handled by an automated system and must be addressed prior to the next return to base, but if you did then telepresence robots, or a team flown over from a nearby ship in the battlegroup would likely be sufficient. If your ship is having a problem that is likely to cause the loss of the ship and a team of experts alone is not enough to fix it, do you really want to have more bodies on that ship?

People are cheaper than all that tech.

Unmanned drones make sense because they are more capable. That's not the case with most ships.

People are not available though. Navies and militaries in all western nations have huge recruiting problems and that's before dropping fertility rates will shrink the entire pool of able bodied potential recruits.

Don't believe the what you read about dropping birthdates somehow being a disaster.

The US has always been an immigrant nation and despite the current administration that is still how the military is manned.

"U.S. Navy Achieves FY25 Recruiting Goal 3 Months Early"

https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Press-Releases/display-pre...

This is why the US doesn't have a social safety net. Always someone desperate enough to get killed in a war nobody cares about.

Imagine seeing a veteran from the Venezuela campaign begging in the subway. How do you respond without bursting out in laughter?

That's a common misconception. The days of taking anyone who walked into the recruiting office are long over. US Navy recruits are, on average, regular middle class youths with a high school diploma or some college. Most of them could do fine in the civilian labor market if they wanted to.

The truly desperate people don't even meet recruiting standards due to criminal records, health conditions, drug use, low fitness, bad test scores, lack of a high school diploma, etc.

Not really, sorry.

https://news.usni.org/2025/12/19/dod-ig-army-navy-miscounted...

Not that impressive really...

"DoD IG: Army, Navy Miscounted Recruits With Low Academic Scores

The Army and Navy exceeded the legal level of recruits with the lowest acceptable Armed Forces Qualification Test scores, according to a report from the Pentagon’s Inspector General released this week. The services, which are in the midst of reversing years of stagnant new enlistments, each created preparatory courses that would allow potential recruits with low AFQT scores to spend weeks studying under military teachers, in order to raise their scores and then move to boot camp.

While both the Army and Navy have seen success with the preparatory programs, helping the services to meet recruiting goals, following the Pentagon’s guidance on how to count these recruits may have violated federal law, the new report alleges.

Under U.S. law, a service can only have 4 percent of its recruits that score in the lowest percentiles on the AFQT, unless it gets the permission of the secretary of defense, which would bring additional Congressional oversight. As of March 31, 2025, the Navy exceeded that percentage, without permission of the secretary of defense, with 11.3 percent of recruits falling into what the military calls category IV scores, according to the Dec. 11 OIG report...."

https://news.usni.org/2025/12/19/dod-ig-army-navy-miscounted...

Tell me you've never been on a boat without telling me you've never been on a boat.

I've been on a boat. I also do industrial automation for a living.

>We're decades away from having robots that can do maintenance and repair.

Getting robots to fold towels is currently a struggle.

Damn, I might be a robot. Hate folding towel laundry

Towel folding is a solved problem over at boring old Chicago Dryer.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpTuwKu5fY0

Interesting. However, that machine is massive and specialized. I think we are a long way from generic robots being able to achieve something similar, let alone maintain a warship at sea.

slowly.

https://www.hullwiper.co/

but surely..

A submarine automated drone production and deployment platform would be as damaging to a Navy today as aircraft carriers were to battleships.

Why would you want to produce drones from the same facility as you deploy them? You would terribly hinder each task.

It's a storage thing. You can make it so that the parts fit together better in pieces, then you assemble the pieces in theatre during deployment, so you have more drones in combat per mothership.

It's not like taking crude, cracking it, then refining the plastics, yadda yadda yadda. It's more an fast automated assembly thing.

Inside of a submersible warship really is not the place to be conducting assembly of sensitive electronics, and just because you call it "fast automated" doesn't mean it's either of those enough to be feasible in combat situations.

Right. What's more likely is a box launcher in a shipping container. Both China and the US have prototyped that. Launch from anything that can carry a shipping container. Such as a small, expendable self-propelled barge.

As an example loitering munition with foldable wings is already fairly compact. 2x storage space savings might not justify assembly space and effort

There is no might not, it just doesn’t. Someone played StarCraft and wants their carriers. Maintaining fielded equipment is costly enough.

That's fine, it's just the wrong nomenclature.

Lots of weapon systems already require some assembly before use (for compact storage and other reasons), but we don't call that "production" of weapons.

Sounds like a very noisy submarine.

Mostly agree. Battleships were basically obsolete already by the end of WWII. We haven't built a new one since then.

>It’s geriatric hype.

Almost. It's hype for geriatrics, or one geriatric to be precise. Think of it as the USS Trump Reacharound. It'll never get around to being built, but I'm sure the Navy will get lots of concessions from the Dear Leader for proposing it.

US WWII battleships survived many determined air attacks in the Pacific Theater. They were heavily modified to carry more anti-aircraft cannons with huge supplies of ammunition. Improvements in radar, proximity fuses, fire control, and tactical doctrine proved to be extremely effective. Japanese kamikaze aircraft were conceptually similar to modern cruise missiles, just slower.

> Anywhere near the coast of China, a warship is within range of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.[2] Lots of them. If there's a war over Taiwan, the Taiwan Strait will be a no-go zone for US warships.

Not to mention China's attack submarines, with their own anti-ship missiles as well as old-fashioned torpedoes. They have proven their ability to pop up and say "hello!" to US warships in the past. [0] Getting that close wouldn't be as easy when everyone is on a wartime footing, but then again, US ships would be steaming right towards them...

[0] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2007/january/worl...

The Taiwan strait is too shallow for submarines to operate, so in a hypothetical conflict, China's subs will be much further out, trying to keep US strike groups far from the island, while also securing China's supply lines through Malacca.

Note this is one of the material motivations for the CCP gaining control over Taiwan. They'd quite like to move their submarine basing to the east side of the island as a practical matter. It's got deep water and plenty of cliffs/mountains suitable for hardened docks/shelters.

> China's subs will be much further out, trying to keep US strike groups far from the island

I agree that's generally true and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Thinking it through, though: if Japan is party to the conflict its naval assets are likely to be much closer to China, and China will need to keep some assets nearby in the East China Sea to honor the threat regardless.

To be honest the thing that's puzzled me about the Izumo-class ships since I read about them and the conversion they are undergoing to carry F-35Bs is where exactly they'd be safe to operate in a conflict against China. It's not like those planes have great range, and it's not like refueling is usually going to be an option, so if they're going to be put to use those ships are going to be in range of an awful lot of stuff. And what a juicy target for China.

> The Taiwan strait is too shallow for submarines to operate

Is that true of China's smallest diesel-electric attack subs? I'd think the reason for them not to operate there would be a lack of targets.

edit: I take the latter part back. Apparently mine-laying in the straight by US submarines is hypothetically something that could happen in the conflict, and that would certainly constitute a target for China

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/december/you...

> The Taiwan strait is too shallow for submarines to operate

Welcome to 2025. How about those unmanned submarines that can be made dirty cheap?

>The British Navy had a fad for light cruisers at one point, "eggshells armed with sledgehammers".

Do you mean 'battle cruisers'?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser

'Light cruisers' were different again.

>No Japanese or German battleship in WWII survived a determined air attack. Yamato, Tirpiz, Bismark - all lost to air attack.

Bismark was finished off by surface ships after the initial air attack.

Tirpitz took many sorties to sink.

The sinking of the British Prince of Wales and Repulse by the Japanese is probably a better example of how battleships became vulnerable to airpower.

The story ahead of the Tirpiz sinking is fascinating [0], right up there with the account in Blind Man's Bluff of Ivy Bells [1].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Source

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

> The sinking of the British Prince of Wales and Repulse by the Japanese is probably a better example of how battleships became vulnerable to airpower.

In retrospect the Japanese got a bit lucky there; subsequent air attacks on battleships show they can be remarkably tough. Musashi took 19 torpedo and 17 bomb hits to sink.

But these days you’re defending against the likes of squadrons of low flying B52s firing 20 (possibly nuclear) cruise missiles each. The bombers can fly back and re-arm much more quickly than any fleet, and there are a lot more bombers than ships. Add in submarines, destroyers and other platforms with even more missiles and I doubt any large ship or fleet will last long in any serious conflict.

Sure, I wasn't trying to defend this silly idea of bringing back battleships.

Worth noting that the attack on the Bismarck was by biplane Gloucester gladiators which were outdated even at the start of the war.

Compare them to the planes that carried out attacks in the Pacific theatre. The Grumman Avenger was maybe 2 generations newer (and actually remained in service until the 1960s(

The Bismark was hit by 2 torpedoes from Faery Swordfish torpedo bombers (not Gloucester Gladiators).

While the Swordfish looked rather outdated, they were very successful as torpedo bombers.

Yes! The Swordfish - completely right. Not sure why I remembered otherwise.

Was the Swordfish successful? I think it was used at Narvik but it was slow and not very manoeuvrable.

From wikipedia:

"Despite being obsolescent, the Swordfish achieved some spectacular successes during the war, including sinking one battleship and damaging two others belonging to the Regia Marina (the Italian navy) during the Battle of Taranto, and the famous attack on the German battleship Bismarck, which contributed to her eventually being sunk. Swordfishes sank a greater tonnage of Axis shipping than any other Allied aircraft during the war. The Swordfish remained in front-line service until V-E Day, having outlasted some of the aircraft intended to replace it."

They also took part in the Norwegian campaign, the (still controversial) attack on Mers-el-Kébir, the defense of Malta and the Battle of Cape Matapan.

The fact that was slow had some advantages for launching torpedoes. I've also heard it said that the Bismarck struggled to shoot them down because its fire control systems were not calibrated for planes that slow (don't know if that is true).

"Indeed, its takeoff and landing speeds were so low that, unlike most carrier-based aircraft, it did not require the carrier to be steaming into the wind. On occasion, when the wind was right, Swordfish were flown from a carrier at anchor."

Despite looking like something from WW1, they only entered service in 1936.

There is one on display at the Imperial War museum in Duxford, UK.

My father had a friend who flew Swordfishes in WW2. He was quite a character.

The Bismark was also attacked by biplanes with defective torpedos (thankfully, that saved HMS Sheffield). Basically only two torpedos even hit the german battleship.

Presumably because the british torpedos were so awful, Tirpitz was attacked with regular bombs, which meant they were using the worst method of sinking a ship, from the top down, and so it didn't do much until they whipped out the ultra heavy ones. And it's not like the attacks were going poorly, Tirpitz was taking the hits because it could not kill the planes.

So what would a guided missile battleship look like?

my guess would be trident sized(2m) silos as the main battery and you fill them with vls cells as a working battery. for armor It needs to be able to defend agenst it's own gun right, so that would probably be a bunch of missile defense systems.

It is often said that aircraft carriers replaced battleships but I don't think that is the case, I think aircraft carriers are kind of their own thing and the battleship role was actually replaced by ballistic missile submarines. Think about it, where are the big guns in the navy located? And the more tenuous but fun argument, look how the ships are named, battleships got state names, SSBN's got state names coincidence, I think not.

Battleships are meant to fight other battleships. And you don't nuke ships. They are a relic from WWI when ships still had to engage each other directly.

They also filled a shore bombardment role. But you also don't use nukes for that (rather modern aircraft).

Disclaimer: IANAS (I Am Not A Squid)

> And you don't nuke ships

Not for lack of trying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUM-44_SUBROC

And the Iowa battle ships were later equipped to handle "special weapons"

But in seriousness, the restraint shown in the use of nuclear weapons is amazing, one day the genie will be let out of the lamp but it hasn't yes.

On the topic of genies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie (sigh) yes an air to air missile with a nuclear warhead was not only invented it was built and deployed... With how hard we were actively flirting with the demon that is nuclear war it is incredible that anyone is still alive.

> Anywhere near the coast of China, a warship is within range of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.[2] Lots of them.

Yes, which is why the DDG(X) class has loads of stealth built in, to make it harder for those missiles to lock on.

One of the most important tools for fighting missiles is... an aircraft carrier. Early warning air systems (E2 Hawkeye), interceptors (F35), mostly for blowing up scouting craft.

Missiles can only home into what they can detect and see. Blowbup their eyes (RADAR systems) and they are flying blind. It's a lot of ocean out there and the horizon is surprisingly short.

Flight is your best way to cover a lot of ocean and find an enemy, but anything flying should be taken out by an F35.

--------

I'm not so against a rail gun or any of these future weapons per se. IIRC Japan has deployed a rail gun and they are an ally, with the right R&D team / licensing we might be able to get a working design.

But you know, that depends on how well Japans Railgun works. Ditto with laser systems and whatnot: as long as we test the crap out of them it's fine to deploy.

> The sinking of the Moskva was the first demonstration of this, and Ukraine has since taken out about eight more Russian warships and many smaller craft, using various missiles and drones.

Moskva is barely comparable to a singular US Destroyer, let alone a cruiser or larger boat.

And USA deploys large teams of Destroyers to help watch each other (and protect the carrier at the core of their fleet).

I'd expect that a drone being launched at a US Carrier strike group would simply be gunned down by the machine guns of an F35, long before they get close to the fleet.

-----

The sinking of the Moskva is also a Russian error. We all know that the Moskva's RADAR system could see the drones. The sad truth is that the Moskva's sailors were themselves unready to watch a RADAR screen for hours, days, months. They likely got fatigue and sounded the alarm too late vs the aerial threat.

Or maybe command was not notified quickly enough. Who knows? Communication error? There's a whole slew of chain of command issues that could have happened.

But we all know that the Moskva has good enough RADAR to see all of those drones. Even in the storm they were in. So it's most likely some kind of human error along the way.

USA, and other NATO forces, have anti-fatigue measures (better software, better training). Furthermore, we run missions vs Houthis and gain battle experience, or also shoot down Iranian missiles on their way to Israel. These missions (exercises??) will keep our sailors in better shape than the awful training the Russians have.

> Anywhere near the coast of China, a warship is within range of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.[2] Lots of them.

truck-mounted? Are you on CCP's payroll to downplay and cover the rise of its military strength?

Chinese navy has YJ-20 hypersonic anti-ship ballistic missile fitted on its Type-055 destroyers. At Mach 10 with 1,500km range, it is the most advanced anti ship missiles ever developed & deployed on the sea. YJ-20 itself is the ship-launched version of the YJ-21, which has been spotted on H-6 bombers for ages. With YJ-20 and YJ-21, you don't get to "coast of China" to experience their "truck-mounted" missiles.

Interestingly, you choose to ignore all these publicly available facts that can be easily verified and try to paint the Chinese navy as some 1980s forces relying on "truck-mounted missiles" for anti ship missions. Well done, you deserve a bonus for your strategic deception job!

Are you on the CIA's payroll to try to get CCP to waste money? I bet the truck mounted missiles are still cheaper. If they can service a target with a truck mounted missile instead of a Mach 10 missile, they'd be fools not to.

care to explain how the US doesn't operate such super effective trucks? Trump doesn't like them? or maybe the kick backs are not as good as battleships?

If Himars count as missile trucks then they do. Sometimes they just park one on a ship deck

Does the US do that? I only recall hearing about that kind of shenanigan from Ukraine.

The other reply already mentioned HIMARS. There's also ATACMS, which are larger missiles that fire from the same platforms IIRC. The US also really likes to use air power against ships and keep them really far away from home turf, so they wouldn't have a lot of use for truck-launched anti ship missiles until things are pretty far down the shitter. It's probably not a coincidence that they also often seem to think the simple and cheap solution is beneath their dignity. That said, if I was in charge we'd have a lot more missiles.

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