The Trump-class battleship faces a major obstacle: reality

On Monday, US President Donald Trump unveiled plans for a new “Trump-class” battleship, saying it would be “the fastest, largest and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.”

He greeted the ships as “some of the deadliest surface warships,” promising that they would “help maintain American military supremacy.” [and] instill fear in America’s enemies everywhere. »

But there’s one glaring problem: Battleships have been decades obsolete. The last one was built more than 80 years ago, and the U.S. Navy retired the last Iowa-class ships almost 30 years ago.

Once symbols of naval power with their massive cannons, battleships have long been eclipsed by modern aircraft carriers and destroyers armed with long-range missiles.

While calling the new warships “battleships” might be a misnomer, defense experts say there remain several gaps between Trump’s vision and modern naval warfare.

Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, rejected the idea, writing in a Comment from December 23 that “such discussion is unnecessary because this ship will never sail.”

He argued that the program would take too long to design, cost far too much and run counter to the Navy’s current distributed firepower strategy.

“A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water,” Cancian said.

Bernard Loo, a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, described the proposal as “a prestige project more than anything else.”

He compared it to the Japanese super-battleships Yamato and Musashi of World War II – the largest ever built – which were sunk by carrier-based aircraft before playing a significant role in combat.

“Historically, we looked at battleships and the bigger they were, the better… [and] from a very layman’s perspective of strategy, size matters. I mean size, in reality it doesn’t always matter, but in this case, for the layman it matters,” Loo said.

He added that the size of the proposed battleship – displacing more than 35,000 tonnes and measuring more than 840 feet, or just over two football fields long – would make it a “bomb magnet”.

“The size and prestige value of it all makes it an even more tempting target, potentially for your opponent,” Loo said.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, suggested that Trump might be attracted to the symbolic power of battleships, which were the most visible icons of naval firepower for much of the 20th century.

The USS Missouri, completed in 1944 and the last American battleship built, welcomed Japan’s surrender in 1945.

Clark noted that the U.S. Navy recommissioned four World War II battleships in the 1980s as part of its strategy to expand its 600-ship fleet during the Cold War to counter the Soviet Union. “This may be an era in which the president thinks the United States had the last naval supremacy.”

The battleships last saw combat in 1991, when modernized Iowa-class battleships provided shore bombardment fire support to coalition forces in the first Gulf War.

According to the US Navy, the “Trump class” battleship, which will be part of a new “golden fleet” of warships, will be equipped with weapons such as conventional cannons and missiles, as well as electronic rail guns and laser weapons. It will also be able to carry nuclear and hypersonic missiles.

Such a ship would essentially function as a large destroyer, whether or not it was called a battleship.

However, CSIS’s Cancian countered that such a design runs counter to the Navy’s distributed operations model, which seeks to reduce vulnerability by spreading firepower among many assets.

“This proposal would go in the other direction, creating a small number of large, expensive and potentially vulnerable assets,” he wrote.

Even if the “Trump-class” battleship proves technically feasible, analysts say cost would be the deciding obstacle.

Loo said U.S. weapons programs routinely run over schedule and over budget.

The Navy Zumwalt-class destroyers – the largest surface combatant ships currently at 15,000 tonnes – have been reduced from 32 to three ships due to soaring costs. More recently, the Constellation-class frigate has been canceled due to design and labor issues.

Clark estimated that the Trump class would cost two to three times as much as current destroyers. With the price of the Arleigh-Burke destroyers being around $2.7 billion each, this implies that a single battleship could cost more than $8 billion, not including the huge expenses associated with crewing and maintaining it.

The cost of the crew and their maintenance will put increased pressure on an already strained Navy budget, he added.

RSIS Loo was more critical in his assessment, calling the decision a strategic error. “At the very least, as far as I’m concerned, it’s strategic hubris.”