Critics rip Trump-class battleships idea, saying it’s not what the Navy needs

The Trump-class battleships that President Trump unveiled recently at his Mar-a-Lago estate will be lighter and shorter than their Iowa-class counterparts, which now mostly serve as floating museums. However, the USS Defiant, the first ship in the class, will be larger than any Navy surface combatant built since the end of World War II.

The Defiant will be about 880 feet long and displace approximately 35,000 tons. The now-retired U.S.S. New Jersey is more than 880 feet in length and displaces about 60,000 tons, following modifications that were made after the war. Still, the Trump class battleships will be triple the size of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the workhorse of the Navy surface fleet.

Mr. Trump wants at least two of the self-described battleships to be constructed over the next two and a half years and intends to add as many as 20 to the Navy’s inventory. They will form the basis of his “Golden Fleet,” which also includes commissioning a new class of Navy frigates based on the Coast Guard’s 4,500-ton National Security Cutters.

“It is my job to equip our sailors to win the fight at sea with the finest ships in our history,” Navy Secretary John C. Phelan said in a statement. “Now, when a conflict arises, you’re going to ask us two questions: Where is the carrier and where is the battleship.”

The USS Defiant and the follow-up Trump-class battleships will operate in a traditional air and missile defense role as part of a carrier strike group and be able to command their own Surface Action Group for surface and anti-submarine warfare operations.

“We need a larger surface combatant and the Trump-class battleships meet that requirement,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of Naval Operations, said in a statement. “We will ensure continuous improvement, intellectually honest assessments about the requirement to effectively deter and win in the 2030s and beyond, and disciplined execution resulting in a fleet unparalleled in lethality, adaptability, and strength.”

The Navy considered multiple size options, including models that displace up to 50,000 tons, before settling on the 35,000-ton Trump-class. The cost of building the battleships in the U.S. could range from $10 billion to $15 billion, depending on the size and the systems that are included, the U.S. Naval Institute reported.

Artistic renderings of the proposed USS Defiant were on hand at Mar-a-Lago during Monday’s rollout of the Trump-class battleships. But a timeframe for the design phase, which Mr. Trump said he would be involved in, has not been released.

Analysts and Navy insiders have long pushed for a larger surface combatant ship than the overworked Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

“The Arleigh Burke was just not cutting it,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said. “They were getting stressed out by the Houthi threat. They didn’t have enough missile capacity for these highly-contested environments like China.”

Retired Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer, agreed that a new blueprint for the Navy’s shipbuilding program was needed. However, he said a class of 30,000-ton large surface combatants isn’t what the Navy needs today.

Securing a large, distributed fleet of minimally manned or unmanned ships with sufficient weapons magazines to contest Chinese threats at sea should have been their goal, said Mr. Montgomery, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.

“As imagined, the battleships will likely be another two or three ship class,” he said. “The Navy needs ship classes with large numbers to defray the training, maintenance and supply chain costs.”

He said a more radical plan would have been to retire the three Zumwalt-class destroyers, and use the funds — along with some money from the battleship effort — to add 10-15 years to the existing fleet of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

“That is an executable, cost-effective plan. But it’s not ‘splashy,’ so I suspect it will not happen,” Mr. Montgomery said. “These ‘battleships’ will achieve none of these tactical goals.”

Mark Cancian, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, doesn’t believe the Trump-class battleships will make it past the concept phase.

“It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower,” he said in an essay for the Washington-based think tank. “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”

A Trump-class battleship would be much larger than any vessel the U.S. has built in the past 80 years, other than aircraft carriers. It took 11 years before the first Zumwalt-class warship was commissioned, and the Trump-class battleship will be more than twice its size.

“The first ship, the USS Defiant, is likely to commission in the early to mid-2030s, assuming it is built at all,” Mr. Cancian said.

Navy officials said the Trump-class battleships will each have a complement of about 650-850 crewmembers. That will also bring about problems because the Navy’s surface fleet remains undermanned. The Navy will have to give up something to pay for it. That will most likely mean early retirements for some Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, Mr. Clark said.

“There are too many people, it’s too expensive, and it creates all the downstream costs for the Navy,” he said.

Building the Trump-class battleships will require thousands of experienced shipyard workers, amid a growing labor shortage that has resulted in shipyards bidding against each other for personnel.

Even calling the new Trump-class vessels “battleships” is questionable, Mr. Cancian said.