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By Ellie Cook
Senior Defense Reporter
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President Donald Trump has hailed his new class of "battleship"—named for himself—as "100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built." And it will counter "everyone," the president said as he unveiled the project on Monday.
The U.S. has not used "battleships" since the Iowa-class vessels were retired in the early 1990s. But Trump had publicly weighed in on a return to 20th-century battleships and said he would be involved in the design of the new vessel. He previously criticized U.S. naval vessels as unsightly.
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The 850-crew Trump-class battleships will be the centerpiece of Trump's "Golden Fleet" of advanced vessels. The Navy this month announced a new set of small combatant ships based on the U.S. Coast Guard's Legend-class national security cutter as part of the vaunted new "fleet."
The administration said 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 and become the navy's flagship, the government said. The cost per ship is likely to run into several billion dollars.
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How Does The Trump Class Compare?
The Trump-class battleship "will be the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world's oceans," Secretary of the Navy John Phelan said as the design was announced.
Russia's surface fleet is generally considered to be far weaker than its submarines, which are often very stealthy, difficult to detect and can launch very long-range attacks.
But China currently operates the largest navy in the world by number of ships. It has also heavily invested in its shipbuilding industry, while the U.S. ability to churn out ships has long been plagued by delays and overspending. The U.S. Navy, while formidable, is stretched across the world.
Analysts said there are some similarities to be tentatively drawn between the nascent Trump-class battleship and the Soviet-era Kirov nuclear-powered guided-missile heavy cruisers and China's Type 055 destroyer.
"But both these ships are answers to America's superiority in aircraft carriers," said Frederik Mertens, a strategic analyst with the Dutch think tank TNO. "In essence, this battleship would trump ships the [U.S. Navy] already has a superior answer to and that are better countered by airpower and submarines," he told Newsweek.
The U.S. has 11 aircraft carriers, including the world's largest, the Gerald R. Ford. The carrier and its strike group have spent weeks looming over Venezuela's shores as the Trump administration keeps up its pressure on Caracas.
Beijing celebrated the launch of the Fujian, its most advanced aircraft carrier of its fleet of three, last month. It is kitted out with electromagnetic catapults to launch aircraft.
The new Trump-class ships will be able to strike targets at 80 times the range current ships can reach, according to information newly released by the Navy.
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.
Russia and China have hypersonic weapons, which the U.S. currently does not field. Moscow has semi-regularly fired hypersonic missiles at targets in Ukraine since the early weeks of its invasion on February 24, 2022.
The newly announced large-surface combatant, measuring up to 880 feet in length, will also be able to launch nuclear-capable cruise missiles, as well as high-powered lasers and guns, according to the Navy. Many of these technologies are still being developed.
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 decommissioned Iowa-class battleships measured about 887 feet in length.
The funding path for the new battleships is not clear, and the Navy is contending with multiple competing priorities. The impact on other programs, not least the Navy's planned F/A-XX next-generation fighter jet, remains to be seen.
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