President Donald Trump's announcement of a new class of battleships (battleships) bearing his name puts new emphasis on the US military's shipbuilding program, which in recent years has failed to deliver new warships on time and on budget - something Trump himself emphasized in his speech at Mar-a-Lago on Monday.
"We produce the best equipment in the world, far ahead of everyone else, no one even comes close. "But we're not building them fast enough," Trump said, announcing that he would soon meet with leading U.S. defense contractors to ramp up production of the new battleships and other weapons programs.
But at least when it comes to the battleship plan, it appears the Navy will be swimming against the tide, both in terms of how the ships themselves are built and in some of the weapons systems the service says will be on board.
Here's what to consider about the proposed Trump-class battleships:
The Vision
A U.S. Navy fact sheet released Monday says the Trump-class will be "the deadliest warship ever built".
At up to 880 feet long (about 268 meters) and displacing 30,000 to 40,000 tons, they will be the largest surface combatants built by the US Navy since World War II. For comparison, famous battleships such as the USS Missouri, on which Japan's surrender was signed in 1945, were 887 feet long and had a displacement of about 58,000 tons.
The largest surface combatants in the US Navy's fleet are currently the "Zumwalt"-class destroyers (Zumwalt), which have a displacement of 15,000 tons.
The ships are expected to have "the most destructive firepower of any surface ship ever sailed - with the ability to engage an enemy at a distance 80 times greater than the previous class," says the Navy's new website for the ships.
The battleships will be armed with new nuclear-capable cruise missiles, which will be launched from 12 cells on board. The missiles will be hypersonic - traveling more than five times the speed of sound - and maneuverable to confuse enemy defenses.
The "Trump" It will also have 128 vertical launch cells that can be used for slower-flying Tomahawk cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, or missile defense interceptors. Other weapons would include a rail gun, five-inch conventional guns and an array of lasers and smaller guns.
Overall, the planned ships would be 100 times more powerful than those World War II-era battleships, Trump said.
The hurdles: Building such large ships
The administration has not given a timeline for how long the design phase — in which the president has said he will personally participate — or the construction of the first two ships would take.
The project for the new battleships would be led by a shipyard that has struggled with supply in recent years and that U.S. Navy Secretary John Fillon said this year was in complete disarray.
"All of our programs are a mess," he said during a House hearing. to the representatives in June. "I think our best performance (on a ship) is six months behind schedule and 57 percent over budget... That's the best."
Last month, Fillon ended the Constellation-class frigate program, which was about three years behind schedule and was expected to produce much smaller and less sophisticated ships than the new battleships Trump is now proposing.
As for large and sophisticated ships, the Navy's newest aircraft carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy, is about two years behind its scheduled delivery date of July of this year. Those delays are attributed to new landing systems and weapons elevators that the service is still trying to certify.
There's also the question of who will build those new ships. U.S. shipyards are already overwhelmed with ongoing construction, maintenance and overhaul projects. "We no longer have the shipbuilding and marine industry infrastructure to do this quickly," said analyst Carl Schuster, a former U.S. Navy captain.
Ships the size of the "Trump" class would require the same dock space as the large amphibious and logistics ships that the Navy also needs, so shuttered shipyards would have to be reactivated or new ones built, Schuster said.
Then there’s the issue of labor. “A national program to recruit and train shipyard workers, electricians, information systems specialists, and sensor systems specialists will be needed to support this program,” Schuster said.
Navy Secretary Fillon recently pointed out the difficulties of recruiting workers, especially when it comes to pay. If workers can make the same money working in an Amazon warehouse or a retail store, they’re less likely to choose the hard, grueling work of a shipyard, he told a defense conference last month.
Alessio Patalano, a professor of war and strategy at King’s College London, believes Washington has the technical know-how to build these ships, but it needs to overcome the shipyard problem. "The question is ... whether the United States has the capacity and manpower to turn a visual golden fleet into a real one," he said.
Finally, there's the cost. Trump said Monday that the new battleships would eventually replace the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, the backbone of the U.S. surface fleet. Those destroyers cost about $2 billion each. A Trump-class ship would cost as much as $15 billion, according to a report in USNI News on Monday.
The Obstacles: Getting it Right
Schuster noted the Navy's shaky history of seeing ambitious shipbuilding programs through to completion.
Take the aforementioned Zumwalt-class destroyers - a program that began in the 1990s. The plan for 32 of these high-tech, stealthy ships was eventually cut to three, with the last of the class, the USS Lyndon B. Johnson, still awaiting commissioning, not expected before 2027. Or the "Constellation"-class frigates, which were cut to a maximum of two hulls from a planned 20.
And as Schuster points out, the last shipbuilding programs that have reached the planned number have been far from successful - specifically the Littoral Combat Ships. That program, which produced more than three dozen hulls, saw some of them retired after just five years of service, as they were plagued by reliability problems and a lack of a clearly defined mission.
At least one of the weapons planned for the "Trump" — the railgun — will have to be rescued from the dustbin of history if it is to be used. The Navy canceled its railgun program in 2021 when technical challenges proved too difficult to overcome. The technology uses electromagnetic energy to launch a projectile at speeds far higher than current systems, but it requires enormous amounts of energy, and most programs around the world have made little progress toward creating a commercially viable and reliable weapon.
Schuster says the Trump administration also needs to make changes to its management. "This project will be managed by NAVSEA (Navy Sea Systems Command)—an organization and personnel that have failed every surface combatant program this century," he said. "I believe Trump needs to clean up this organization if he wants any shipbuilding program to succeed."
Patalano points to another problem: manning the new, larger ships, which are expected to have between 650 and 850 sailors on board. "The U.S. Navy is not known for being at the forefront of automation and innovative solutions in terms of more compact crew management." That will require "a major cultural shift," he says.
The Future Naval Battlefield
Even if the Navy were to successfully put a fleet of "Trump"-class battleships into the sea, the question remains whether they would be fit for modern missions.
It's a question that's also being asked about the current "pearls" of the US Navy - aircraft carriers. Can the massive ships (about 1,100 feet long) survive a conflict with an equal adversary like China? China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has the DF-26 medium-range ballistic missile, called the "carrier killer" because it is designed to hit the American giants at long distances, long before the aircraft carrier's planes enter the battle.
Some analysts say Washington should focus on a large number of small vessels capable of carrying several missiles or drones, and spread them out over vast expanses of water. This would neutralize Beijing's advantage in missile numbers by giving it too many targets to hit.
Critics say that large battleships, like aircraft carriers, concentrate too much firepower on a single platform. "The advantage of small ships and unmanned systems is that the quantity can be increased at a relatively low cost, and survivability can be increased by spreading the risk over multiple platforms," says Yoo Ji-hoon, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Defense Studies.
Furthermore, large ships are vulnerable not only to missiles. There is the question of how they will cope with drones - cheap unmanned platforms in the air and at sea that Ukraine has shown can disable or even sink submarines and surface ships. China displayed a number of underwater drones at a military parade in Beijing in September. Analyst H. I. Sutton writes that large Chinese drones could be used to lay mines to block U.S. ports in the Pacific. If the proposed American ships can’t go to sea, they won’t be able to use their firepower.
Change has to start somewhere
It’s a long list of challenges facing the Trump-class battleship program, but analysts say Washington shouldn’t be written off. After all, as Trump said in his speech, this is the country that during World War II increased its production enough to build several ships a day.
Schuster sees a more recent example from the 1960s. “I think Trump is trying to achieve the naval equivalent of Kennedy’s call for a space program. Remember, the Soviets seemed to be ahead of us in space - a direct threat to our security - before Washington launched the "Apollo" program, thanks to which an American stepped on the moon in 1969.
But Schuster doesn't think the United States can do it alone this time. It needs allies - something difficult to organize, given the laws governing American shipbuilding. "China is getting closer to being able to challenge our access to the Western Pacific. Since this poses a threat to both Japan and South Korea, enlisting their help is a necessary solution to the problem," Schuster believes.
This cooperation is in its early stages, but the seeds are already being sown. On Monday, Trump praised the South Korean company Hanwha Ocean, which is investing billions in the Philadelphia Shipyard, where future U.S. Navy ships could be built.