The Golden Fleet?
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The Trump-class “battleships” (probably designated BBG, or “guided missile battleship”) would displace some 35,000 tons and carry a variety of advanced weapons.
The arsenal would include a rail gun, hypersonic missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, a 128-cell vertical launch system (VLS), 5″ guns, and defensive lasers.
A flight deck could carry helicopters or an MV-22 Osprey.
Several of these systems are still in development and are not expected to mature in the timeframe established by the President. While President Trump claimed that these would be the largest battleships in the history of the US Navy, a casual glance suggests they would be roughly 2/3 the size of the Iowa-class battleships built in the 1940s.
The President also mandated that the ships be visually attractive, suggesting that part of the logic of building what will be exceedingly expensive warships involves “showing the flag” and overawing locals in port visits around the world.
President Trump emphasized that he expects the first two hulls to hit the water in two and a half years, a timeline that is not plausible given current understanding of the constraints imposed by the laws of physics.
Collecting a few other thoughts:
- I don’t at all mind recycling the designation “battleship” for these ships. They’re not like 20th century battleships, but then modern cruisers and destroyers don’t much resemble their WWII kin, either.
- The Navy has played with the idea of a large surface combatant a number of times over the past forty years, so the idea of large ships isn’t as novel as some people seem to think.
- That said, it’s weird to dive into this program now, given significant questions about the vulnerability of large surface ships to missiles and drones. To be sure I do not consider surface warships obsolete (there are a lot fewer Prince of Wales moments than people think), but I’d still take care about putting all of the eggs into a very few baskets.
- The concept of operations is… uh, not really there. Which is to say that we have no concrete idea of how these things would be used or how they would interact with other Navy assets.
- We do not, at the moment, have anything near the shipbuilding capacity to undertake this project… although part of the point seems to be to jumpstart the shipbuilding industry.
Some other folks… Mark Cancian:
On December 22, President Trump announced a new class of “battleships” that will be 100 times more powerful than previous battleships and larger than any other surface combatant on the oceans. The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion. However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail. It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.
The general length of time it takes to design and produce large warships creates additional uncertainty for any naval shipbuilding endeavor, as well. Since the end of the Cold War, the Navy has seen a number of major warship programs be severely truncated, or outright cancelled, for a variety of reasons. As one prime example, the service originally planned to acquire 32 Zumwalt class stealth destroyers before slashing that number to just three and drastically watering-down their capabilities. The Trump administration also just recently axed the Constellation class frigate program, which had turned into a major boondoggle, as you can read more about here.
The Trump class “battleship” announcement notably comes on the same day the Navy confirmed to TWZ that the first of its future FF(X) frigates will be delivered with the glaring omission of a VLS and are clearly meant to be produced as cheaply and quickly as possible. At least the first ships will have the same armament of the much-derided Littoral Combat Ship.
I’ll give the last word to Tom Nichols:
The goal, apparently, was to give a childlike president a new toy, named after himself, in exchange for gobs of money that the Navy will figure out how to spend later.