In principle, I am all for fitting out a modern-day descendant of Iowa-class dreadnoughts. Whether doing so is practical is another question.

Halloween decorations are going up, so maybe it’s fitting that weird and eerie things may lie in store for the US Navy surface fleet. That device—the weird and the eerie—comes from Mark Fisher’s book by the same title. It’s a treatise on “weird fiction” ranging from HP Lovecraft—a long-ago denizen of Providence, Rhode Island, I might add—to Stanley Kubrick and beyond. But the dichotomy spans far beyond literary criticism. It’s about human psychology more than a subgenre of fiction. And psychology suffuses everything we do.

Fisher breaks down the Freudian concept of the uncanny—which he defines as “the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange” (his emphasis)—into two intimately related but distinct phenomena. The essence of the weird is presence; the essence of the eerie is absence. Both, says Fisher, “allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside.”

This is about looking at ourselves and our society along unusual tangents.

The weird is “that which does not belong” (his emphasis). Something is jarring when it should not be, but is, present in familiar surroundings. For instance, sea monsters who have come to Earth from the cosmos should not be lurking in waters off the North Shore of Massachusetts, to name the premise of Lovecraft’s short story “The Shadow over Innmouth.” The story constitutes part of his “Cthulhu Mythos,” a saga of short works meant to arouse terror over baleful space monsters’ incursions into our everyday world.

Battleships Would Be Weird in a Modern Fleet

Though less angst-inducing than Lovecraftian aliens, something weird befell the US Navy on September 30—courtesy of the commander-in-chief. President Donald Trump delivered remarks to flag officers assembled at the US Marine Corps installation in Quantico, Virginia, following a stemwinder about martial culture from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Almost in passing, President Trump lauded battleships as an option for the surface navy. “I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships. … I look at the Iowa out in California and I look at different ships in the old pictures. I used to watch Victory at Sea. I love Victory at Sea.”

(So do I.)

So aesthetics is part of battleships’ appeal for Trump. Alongside the naval romanticism, he touted dreadnoughts’ armament of 68-foot-long main guns, their all-steel construction, and the stout armor that sheathes their hulls. “Some people would say, no, that’s old technology… I don’t think it’s old technology when you look at those guns, but it’s something we’re actually considering, the concept of [a] battleship, nice 6-inch size, solid steel, not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it.” (In reality, battleship armor is far thicker than 6 inches in places—in particular where it’s positioned to shield vital systems such as the propulsion plant from hostile fire.) And the president has displayed an affinity for battleships over the years, delivering campaign speeches from the decks of Iowa and Wisconsin during his first run for the presidency. In September 2015, for instance, he expressly endorsed recommissioning the four World War II-vintage Iowa-class battlewagons (USS Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin).

Now, at Quantico, Trump did not repeat his call to bring the Iowa class back to life. And a good thing, too; that would have been really weird. These are ships that are over 80 years old now, in their dotage as museum ships. Bring-back-the-battleships proponents used to point out that the ships were not that old in mechanical terms, and that is true. The Iowa class served for a few years in World War II, came out of retirement for the Korean War, briefly returned to service in Vietnam (in the case of New Jersey), and were recommissioned during the Reagan naval buildup of the 1980s. That’s a short steaming life for a navy that tries to wring 50 years of service out of capital ships.

But chronological age does matter. Those were hard ships to keep running, even during their Cold War second winds, when they remained youthful compared to today. It turns out that hulls, machinery, piping systems, and weapons decay while a vessel sits in mothballs, despite steadfast efforts to preserve them. And the challenge sprawls beyond matériel. After more than 33 years in retirement—Missouri, the last of the breed, left the fleet early in 1992—regenerating a corps of people with the technical expertise to operate them would be burdensome verging on impossible. Who would do the teaching?

Again, weird.

America Can’t Bring Back Its Old Battleships. Could It Build New Ones?

There’s also an eerie aspect to the battleship debate. We find our surroundings eerie when they’re vacant of something familiar. Emptiness is haunting. That’s why, as Mark Fisher notes, “a sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces.” Instead “we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human.” Wilderness meets his standard when an “eerie cry” from some unknown creature rings out amid silence. Ruined or abandoned structures—abandoned churches, castles, farmhouses, or barns—are eerie as well.

(So, for that matter, are mothballed ships. By chance I got the chance to board Wisconsin in Philadelphia for a farewell tour the day before the ship was sealed up for good in 1992. No crew, no lights, no power: eerie.) Ruins are both creepy and majestic because people should be there, carrying on their everyday routine—but they aren’t. And absent the familiar, who knows what macabre Lovecraftian things might dwell there?

This time around, Trump seems to want the sea service to rediscover the principles of battleship design rather than recommission four specific, elderly museum ships. That’s a relief; his musings were less weird than they might seem. Firepower, rugged steel construction, an awe-inspiring appearance—those traits seem to be what America’s leader covets in a ship of war.

In the process of praising battleships, Trump singled out something eerie in US fleet design. Aircraft carriers are encased in thick armor, but no surface combatant in the fleet boasts the hulking, battleship-like construction necessary to absorb punishment from enemy missile- and gunfire. Destroyer, cruiser, and littoral-combat-ship hulls are lightly armored in the extreme. Some, as Trump observed, are built entirely of aluminum. Absent that passive form of defense—the resiliency to take a hit and fight on—surface combatants depend on active defenses such as guided missiles and a meager arsenal of guns. They have to prevent taking a hit because they may not survive one.

This being the case, a wisecrack from Winston Churchill rings even truer for the US Navy today than it did in his day at the Admiralty, over a century ago. Churchill contended that it was commonplace for the untutored to liken duels between ironclad ships to duels between armored medieval knights. Knights had ample protection from swords and lances, as well as the ability to mete out punishment using them. Offense and defense were in balance. But Churchill maintained that it was a fallacy to think of a 20th-century naval battle “as if it were two men in armor striking at each other with heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two eggshells striking each other with hammers.” Even in Churchill’s time, the balance at sea had come to favor offense—lopsidedly.

And those were armored ships built with protection as well as firepower and speed in mind. Modern surface combatants fall well short of the standard for capital ships set by sea-power sage Alfred Thayer Mahan around the same time Churchill proffered his jest. Quoth Mahan, “The backbone and real power of any navy are the vessels which, by due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks.” To live up to the Mahanian standard, in other words, capital ships must be able to withstand as well as dish out damage in high-seas battles against peer ships-of-the-line. Battleship design assumed—realistically, given the nature of warfare—that capital ships would take hits in action and must have built-in resiliency so they could keep up the fight.

Mahan and Churchill would find contemporary US fleet design—featuring no genuine capital ships—eerie. Things are haunting by their absence.

Now, in principle, I am all for fitting out a modern-day descendant of Iowa-class dreadnoughts. Whether doing so is practical is another question. The naval-industrial complex is already struggling to expand the US Navy ship count, even without diverting effort into what would be a daunting and resource-intensive new enterprise likely to produce just a few heavy—and exorbitantly expensive—combatants. If President Trump is serious about a neo-battleship initiative, he had better be prepared to invest generous personal attention and energy in making it happen.

In all probability the surface fleet is destined to remain eerie—even as the leadership entertains weird proposals from on high.