Navy to Build “Golden Fleet” of Battleships. Happy New Year! It Must Be 1941.

In October’s piece about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the President lecturing the military's top brass summoned from around the world to Quantico, Virginia, we mentioned Trump saying,

“I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships, by the way… your secretary likes it and I'm sort of open to it…I tell you, it's something we're seriously considering.”

We scoffed,

”This in the new age of drones and anti-ship missiles. Battleships are entirely outmoded, a realization that became apparent even toward the end of World War II.”

It was a mistake to discount what seemed only to be musings, because this is a president who gets whatever he wants, and uses our tax money to get it. Just days ago along came the startling announcement that,

”President Donald Trump has rolled out plans for new large surface combatants for the U.S. Navy."

Yes, his battleships. The Navy's ships of like designs are called a "class" and the new battleships are to be named — needless to say — the “Trump Class":

"I look at different ships in the old pictures. I used to watch 'Victory at Sea'. I love 'Victory at Sea'. And I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them and, man, nothing was going to stop, there were 20 deep and they were in a straight line and there was nothing going to stop them.”

To the admirals at Quantico, he had said,

”And I'm not a fan of some of the ships you do... I don't like some of the ships you're doing aesthetically. They say, oh, it's stealth. I say that's not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you're stealth.”

bygone era

The last of the battleships were built 80 years ago and the last of them of the Iowa-class
The USS Iowa.


were decommissioned in 1992. They had only survived that late because Reagan had brought them out of retirement in his build up
The Iowa's firepower.


of the Navy, newly outfitted with anti-ship missiles, Tomahawk cruise missile launchers, and antimissile defense guns. "They were just about as mean and scary as you could be", said Trump. They were indeed formidable in their day, nearly 900 feet long, bristling with nine 16-inch guns. This writer got a tour of the USS Iowa in the 1980’s.

Trump says the USS Defiant, as the first will be christened,…

"will be be the largest battleship in the history of our country, the largest battleship in the history of the world ever built.”

Well no, it won’t be. It is estimated to displace 30,000 to 40,000 tons in comparison to Iowa-class battleships displacing around 57,540 tons with a full load. And it was the Japanese who floated the biggest battleships ever — the Yamato and Musashi — 864 feet long displacing
Japan's battleship Yamato spotted in trials off Bungo Strait (outside Sukumo Bay) on 20 October 1941.


72,800 tons fully loaded and with 18-inch guns, the largest ever mounted on a warship. The Trump-class comes close in length, though, at 840 feet.

That's more than twice the size of the largest surface combatant ships the Navy currently sails. The design arms the ships with nuclear-tipped and hypersonic missiles, electromagnetic rail-guns, and laser-directed energy weapons. They “will be the flagships of the American naval fleet", says Trump, to be called unsurprisingly the "Golden Fleet", an incongruous choice for the blue-water Navy. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan added,

“The USS Defiant battleship will inspire awe and reverence for the American flag whenever it pulls into a foreign port. It will be a source of pride for every American.”

Trump will also be directly involved in the design process, “because I’m a very aesthetic person”, he says.

“We’re desperately in need of ships,” said Mr. Trump. Very true. Does he recall that he promised a 355-ship Navy when campaigning in 2016, a promise quickly forgotten? “Look, I accomplished the military,” Mr. Trump said obscurely at one point, but force expansion of the Navy did not happen. As if suddenly making good on his pledge, his administration spent some of its last days in office planning for that 355-ship goal, leaving the job to President Biden. Biden also did nothing. The Navy has only 292 ships in its fleet today.

About the battleships, Trump says,

”We’re talking about ten, but we’re gonna start with two, and we’re going to quickly morph into ten, and ultimately we think its going to be anywhere from twenty to twenty-five.”

But as a CNBC headline read, “The 'Trump-class' battleship faces a large obstacle in its way: Reality".

Start with cost. The workhorses of the fleet are the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers which cost about $2.7 billion apiece to build. Using their 9,000-ton displacement as a back-of-envelope gauge, there being no blueprints yet for the new class, the Trump battleships could cost upwards from $8 billion each, a significant drain on the defense budget when multiplied times 25.

Trump expects the Trump-class warship to be…

“the fastest, the biggest, and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built."

A second reality says that the weaponry to make them so powerful is questionable. Both Russia and China boast operational hypersonic missiles while the U.S. is still in developmental stages. (Just days ago China claimed a successful launch and distant strike of a YJ-20 hypersonic off a Type-55 guided missile destroyer.)

The U.S. has successfully tested electromagnetic rail-guns, but gave up on their implementation. They were intended only for the Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyers about twenty years ago as the only combat ship that could deliver the needed electrical power to drive the gun. But spiraling costs cancelled the Zumwalt ships with only three built of the 32 planned, and the rail-gun remains a science experiment with the so far intractable problem that the barrel burns out after too few firings.

The "Golden Fleet" with its 25 at most Trump-class battleships runs counter to the Navy's strategy of distributing firepower over a large number of ships (there are five dozen or so Arleigh-Burke destroyers, e.g.). Compared to a multitude of smaller, faster, maneuverable warships, experts have described the Defiant and its sister ships — almost as long as three football fields — as "bomb magnets". They point out that the Yamato and Musashi saw little action before they were sunk by carrier-launched aircraft.

The U.S. has come to the way overdue realization that we build too few ships with too few shipyards. China with 200 times U.S. shipbuilding capacity has gone past the 350-ship mark at a sprint. Given their size and assumed complexity, the Trump ships will take too long to build and clog what shipyards we have.

Mark Montgomery, a former rear admiral now a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy quoted in The Wall Street Journal declared the "Golden Fleet" plan "exactly what we don't need".

"We do not need ships that are not optimized to provide lethality against the Chinese threat. That is not what these are focused on. They are focused on the visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship."

Called a "prestige project" (viz. Phelan's remarks above), the first ship might better be named the USS Vainglory. Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, commented in a discussion that, “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water…This ship will never sail.”