President Donald Trump has said the U.S. Navy will commission a new class of ships named after himself, which the president described as “100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.”
The new vessels will be the centerpiece of Trump’s new “Golden Fleet” of advanced warships. The Navy earlier this month announced a new set of small combatant vessels based on the U.S. Coast Guard’s Legend-class national security cutter as part of this vaunted new “fleet.”
The administration says the new Trump-class of vessels will be bigger than the battleships previously used by the Navy during the days of World War II up to the early 1990s, when Iowa-class ships were decommissioned.
“The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me because I’m a very aesthetic person,” Trump said on Monday.
Earlier this year Trump had bemoaned the look of military surface ships.
“I don’t like some of the ships you are doing aesthetically,” he told military leaders in September. “They say it is stealth. That’s not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you are stealth.”
During his first term, Trump said the Navy had its smallest number of ships in a century.
The Navy, while a formidable force, is stretched across the world and hit hard by delays in shipbuilding and manpower shortages. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan said the military “desperately needs” the new battleships.
Building these vessels would certainly add firepower to the Navy, but the plans the administration and the military laid out on Monday are both expensive and appear to be on a highly ambitious schedule. Also up for debate is where the U.S. will be able to build these vessels, not to mention whether a handful of large, complicated ships will mean the Navy may end up with fewer vessels than it might need.
What Are The Key Differences?
The administration says the Navy will buy up to 25 of the vessels, the first of which will be named the USS Defiant. It will be built in the early 2030s, the government said.
The Trump-class battleship “will be the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans,” Phelan said.
Among the touted characteristics is an ability to strike targets at 80 times the range current ships can reach. The Navy says it will use large missile vertical launch systems (LMVLS) to “deliver long range hypersonic strike against strategic targets ashore that are unreachable by the current fleet.” Hypersonic weapons travel at least five times the speed of sound.
The large surface combatant will be kitted out with nuclear-capable cruise missiles, as well as high-powered lasers and guns. Many of these technologies are still being developed and have not yet been fielded in the Navy.
According to the specifications published by the Navy, the ship will be up to 880 feet long and carry up to 850 personnel. This is roughly triple the size of the Navy’s current Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
The Trump-class will be more than double the size of the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyers, which are currently the largest surface combatant ships in the Navy, according to USNI News.
The new battleship could also come with a $15 billion price tag, according to the specialist outlet. The Iowa-class battleships of the mid-twentieth century measured about 887 feet in length.
The Trump-class will weigh in at somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 tons, the president said.
The ships will be “bigger, so will carry more missiles and have more capabilities,” said Frederik Mertens, a strategic analyst with TNO, a Dutch think tank. “But whether three ships of say, 12,000 tons would not be more useful than a single ship of 40,000 tons seems to me the question.”
“The key is what is the right mix considering costs, shipbuilding capabilities, personnel and final war-fighting capabilities,” Mertens told Newsweek.
“Is there a demand for a large surface ship with powerful radars, lasers, EW [electronic warfare] and loads of missiles—yes, there probably is,” Mertens said. “Do they need to be battleship sized? I doubt it.”
