President Donald Trump revealed plans for a new class of battleship that would be named after himself.
“These are the best in the world. They'll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” he said in an address Monday.
USS Wisconsin, now a floating museum in Norfolk, was among the last American battleships to see combat during the first Gulf War in 1991, before the last of the Iowa-class battleships were decommissioned in 1992. The United States hasn’t built a new battleship since 1944. With their heavy armor plating, battleships like USS Wisconsin displaced nearly 60,000 tons and carried a crew of 1,900 sailors.
Trump said that during his first term he had considered pulling Iowa-class battleships out of mothballs and modernizing them, but the cost was considered too high.
The new battleships would displace about 35,000 tons and carry a crew of as many as 850 sailors. Though smaller than traditional battleships, the ships would be more than three times the size of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and require more than double the number of sailors to operate.
According to Trump and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, the ships would carry a wide array of armaments, from traditional guns to nuclear-armed cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles. They would carry lasers, which the Navy currently has not fielded, and a rail gun, though the Navy abandoned research on rail guns in 2021, after spending half a billion dollars without showing progress toward a viable weapon.
The Navy has not released the cost of building or operating a fleet of such large surface ships. The service struggles to have enough sailors in to man the current number of ships, including 11 aircraft carriers. Despite a recruiting bump, the service announced in December that it has more than 20,000 open slots on ships at sea. A Navy official said the initial plan is to have a design ready for bid by the early 2030s.
The administration wants to build as many as 25 of the new ships as part of its “Golden Fleet” program to revive naval shipbuilding.
For more than a decade, the Navy has been well behind schedule in producing its current crop of ships. The delays include critical programs like Virginia-class submarines and America-class amphibious assault ships which are used to carry Marines and are somewhat larger than the proposed battleships. The next Ford-class aircraft carrier, the John F. Kennedy was supposed to be delivered to the Navy in 2025, but it isn’t expected to begin sea trials until next year.
In his remarks, Trump singled out Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding Division, which builds the Ford-class aircraft carriers. The final price tag for the carrier was over $13 billion.
“We're also going to be penalizing companies that aren't doing a good job,” Trump said. “For instance, when they built the (aircraft carrier USS) Gerald R. Ford, the cost overruns were ridiculous. That was done in Norfolk, Virginia. We're going to be talking about that with that company. Their cost overruns were out of control.”
Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding Division did not return a request for comment by the time of publication.
