Captain Jim Fennell

than our previous battleships that we had

in World War II, the Iowa class, which you remember from your time in service.

I still remember seeing an Iowa class battleship fire a full broadside.

What will be different now is that they'll be much the same size as the old ones, maybe a little bit bigger.

They'll have, as the president said, they're going to be made from steel, thick steel, so they're going to be survivable.

He talked about sturdy and survivability.

And then he talked about this 100 times more powerful.

which means they're going to have a lot of vertical launch cell tubes.

Our Arleigh Burke-class destroyers have 96 cells, so this would probably have hundreds of more cells to be able to launch these long-range anti-ship cruise missiles

that are going to go at supersonic or even hypersonic speeds, along with the guns.

I mentioned guns that are going to have turrets and guns that are going to be able to fire not just kind of shells like the nine inch or 16 inch guns that we had, the nine 16 inch guns that the Iowa class had, but it'll have the ability to fire rail guns, lasers,

And then again, other kinds of munitions that are going to have much longer range than the old 16 inch shells, which were about 26 miles.

So we're going to have, we're talking about a long way away.

And I think the secretary of the Navy was, I was really pleased with SecNAF Thelon's statements.

He really, as you said, he went down this list of things that we've been really banging on for 20 years about what we need to do.

And the biggest thing that he said was, we are going to go after the, we're not just going to swat down arrows.

We're going to go after the archer.

And then put that in vernacular.

He's talking about war at sea.

We're going to go after those ships that can sink us.