Trump’s Ambitious Battleship Plan Confronts Cost, Strategy and Relevance Issues

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday unveiled what he called the “Trump-class” battleship during an event at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Framed as the flagship of a forthcoming “Golden Fleet,” the vessel is supposed to be “the fastest, biggest and most powerful” surface combatant ever constructed. The announcement, however, immediately collided with assessments from defense specialists who argue that traditional battleships vanished from modern naval doctrine decades ago.

Obsolescence of the Battleship Concept

The U.S. Navy has not commissioned a new battleship since 1944, and the final Iowa-class ships were deactivated in the 1990s. Large-caliber gun platforms once dominated seaborne engagements, but long-range missiles, carrier aviation and networked sensors have since reshaped warfare at sea. Analysts note that aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers and submarines now perform the roles once assigned to battleships—while offering greater reach and flexibility.

Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), wrote on 23 December that the proposed class is unlikely ever to reach the fleet. He cited lengthy design timelines, excessive cost and incompatibility with the Navy’s current “distributed maritime operations” strategy, which favors numerous smaller shooters over a few large targets.

Prestige Versus Practicality

Bernard Loo, senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, called the project primarily symbolic. Drawing parallels to Japan’s World War II super-battleships Yamato and Musashi—both destroyed by carrier-borne aircraft before they could influence the war—Loo argued that sheer size offers little advantage against modern precision weapons. The preliminary specifications released by the Navy list a displacement greater than 35,000 tons and an overall length of roughly 840 feet, dimensions that Loo said would make the ship an enticing target for adversaries equipped with advanced anti-ship missiles.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, suggested the president may be motivated by the historic cachet of battleships. During much of the 20th century, vessels such as USS Missouri symbolized American naval power, even hosting Japan’s surrender in 1945. In the 1980s, four Iowa-class ships were briefly reactivated to bolster a 600-ship fleet aimed at countering the Soviet Union. Battleships last fired in anger during the 1991 Gulf War, when retrofitted Iowas launched Tomahawk cruise missiles and provided shore bombardment.

Proposed Capabilities

The Navy’s outline for the Trump-class envisions a hybrid arsenal. Plans call for conventional rifled guns, vertical-launch missile cells, electromagnetic railguns and laser-based air-defense systems. Designers also intend to integrate nuclear and hypersonic strike weapons. With that mix, the ship would operate more like an outsized guided-missile destroyer than the all-gun vessels of earlier eras.

Even so, Cancian pointed out that clustering so much firepower on a limited number of hulls conflicts with the service’s intent to dilute risk across multiple platforms, including unmanned vessels. A handful of expensive capital ships, he argued, would concentrate both cost and vulnerability.

Financial Hurdles

Cost emerged as the most immediate obstacle. Clark estimated each Trump-class unit would run two to three times the price of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which currently costs about $2.7 billion. That projection places a single hull in the range of $8 billion before lifecycle expenses. Crew salaries, depot maintenance and mid-life modernization would further stretch a Navy budget already juggling carrier refueling, submarine production and other surface-combatant programs.

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Program history offers cautionary examples. The Zumwalt-class stealth destroyer, initially scheduled for 32 ships, was capped at three after costs climbed sharply. More recently, the Constellation-class frigate was canceled due to design and workforce challenges. Loo noted that the United States is not immune to the schedule slips and cost overruns that frequently afflict complex weapons systems.

According to a publicly available Congressional Research Service report, the Navy’s long-range shipbuilding plan already strains projected budgets without accounting for any new capital ship class. Adding a multibillion-dollar battleship line could force trade-offs in submarine procurement, destroyer upgrades or readiness accounts.

Strategic Debate Likely to Continue

While the administration’s proposal underscores an ambition to project maritime dominance, specialists question whether reviving the battleship concept serves that goal. Beyond technical feasibility, they emphasize that contemporary naval combat values dispersed lethality, rapid update cycles and digital integration—attributes difficult to reconcile with a few very large, traditional hulls.

Cancian predicted that even if the Trump-class survives preliminary design reviews, a future administration or Congress would probably terminate the program before any steel is cut. Loo went further, calling the pursuit of such a vessel an act of “strategic hubris” that could divert resources from more pressing challenges in undersea warfare, missile defense and cyber resilience.

The Pentagon has not released a formal timeline or budget estimate for the Trump-class. Until detailed design work begins, the gap between the president’s vision and naval reality is likely to dominate debates inside the Navy, on Capitol Hill and among America’s allies and competitors.

Crédito da imagem: Universal Images Group via Getty Images