- - Trump’s new battleship plan could transform the US Navy – or sink it

Analysis by Brad Lendon, CNNDecember 23, 2025 at 8:35 AM

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US President Donald Trump makes an announcement about the Navy's "Golden Fleet," as Secretary of State Marco Rubio listens, at Mar-a-lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 22, 2025. - Jessica Koscielniak/Reuters

President Donald Trump’s announcement of a new class of battleships bearing his name puts a fresh spotlight on a US naval shipbuilding program that has fallen short on delivering the new warships on time and on budget in recent years, something Trump himself pointed out in his speech from Mar-a-Lago on Monday.

“We make the greatest equipment in the world, by far, nobody’s even close. But we don’t produce them fast enough,” Trump said, as he announced he would meet soon with top US military contractors to ramp up production for the new battleships and other weapons programs.

But at least in the battleship plan, the Navy would seem to be swimming upstream, with construction of the vessels themselves and some of the weapon systems the service says would be aboard.

Here’s what to consider about the proposed “Trump-class” battleships:

The vision

A US Navy fact sheet released Monday says the Trump class will be “the most lethal warship to ever be built.”

With a length of up to 880 feet and a displacement of 30,000 to 40,000 tons, they’ll also be the biggest surface combatants the US Navy has constructed since World War II.

Those battleships, like the renowned USS Missouri, which hosted the Japanese surrender in 1945, were 887 feet long and displaced around 58,000 tons.

The biggest surface combatants in the US Navy fleet now are the Zumwalt destroyers, which displace 15,000 tons.

With the USS Missouri batteship memorial in the background, US Navy personnel await the start of the US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) change of command ceremony on Kilo Pier at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu, Hawaii, on May 3, 2024. - Marco Garcia/AFP/Getty Images

As envisioned, the ships will have “the most destructive fire power of any surface ship to ever sail – having the ability to strike an adversary at 80x the range of the previous class,” the Navy’s new website on the ships says.

The battleships will be armed with new nuclear-capable cruise missiles to be launched from 12 cells on board. The missiles would be hypersonic – more than five times the speed of sound – and maneuverable to confuse enemy defenses.

The Trump class would also feature 128 vertical launch cells that can be used for slower-flying Tomahawk cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, or missile defense interceptors.

Other armaments would include a rail gun, five-inch conventional guns, and a range 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 obstacles: Building them

The administration has given no timeframe for how long it will take for the design phase – which the president said he will personally be involved in – or the building of the first two ships.

The new battleships project would be led by a naval shipbuilding base that has struggled to deliver in recent years and which Navy Secretary John Phelan said this year was in disarray.

“All of our programs are a mess,” he told a US House hearing in June. “I think our best (ship build) is six months late and 57% over budget … That is the best one.”

Then last month Phelan axed the Constellation-class frigate program, which was about three years behind schedule and was expected to yield much smaller and less complex warships than the new battleships Trump now proposes.

As far as large complex ships go, the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS John F Kennedy, has slipped about two years behind its scheduled delivery date, which was July of this year. Those delays have been attributed to new landing and weapons elevator systems which the service is still trying to get certified.

Secretary of the Navy John Phelan speaks, as President Donald Trump listens, at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida on December 22, 2025. - Alex Brandon/AP

Then there’s the question of who will build these new battleships. US shipyards are already stretched thin with current construction, maintenance and overhaul jobs.

“We no longer have the shipbuilding and maritime industrial infrastructure to do this quickly,” said analyst Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain.

Ships the size of the Trump-class would need the same dockyard space as large amphibious and logistical support ships the Navy also needs, so closed shipyards would need to be reactivated or new ones built, Schuster said.

And then there’s the workforce.

“A national scale recruitment and training program for shipyard, electrical, information and sensor system workers (would be) required to support this program,” Schuster said.

Navy Secretary Phelan just recently pointed out the difficulties in recruiting a workforce, especially when it comes to pay.

If workers can make the same money working in an Amazon warehouse or a convenience store, they’re less likely to choose the he arduous, backbreaking jobs found in a naval shipyard, he told a defense conference in Indiana last month.

Alessio Patalano, professor of war and strategy at King’s College London, said Washington has the technical know-how to make these ships, but it must overcome the shipyard problem.

“The question is … whether the US has a sufficient shipyard capacity and workforce to translate a visual gold fleet into a real sailing one,” he said.

Lastly, cost has to be a consideration.

Trump said Monday the new battleships ships would eventually replace the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, the backbone of the US surface fleet.

Those destroyers cost about $2 billion each. A Trump-class ship would have a price tag as high as $15 billion, according to a Monday report from USNI News.

The obstacles: Follow through

Schuster noted the Navy’s sketchy record on seeing ambitious shipbuilding programs followed through to completion.

Take the aforementioned Zumwalt-class destroyers, a program that began in the 1990s. A plan for 32 of the high-tech, stealthy ships, was eventually cut to three, with the last of the class, the USS Lyndon B. Johnson, still awaiting commissioning –– now not expected until 2027.

Or the Constellation-class frigates, which were cut to a maximum two hulls from a planned 20.

And, as Schuster points out, recent shipbuilding programs that have reached plan numbers have fallen well short of overall success, specifically the Littoral Combat Ships. That program, which has produced more than three dozen hulls, has seen some of them retired with as little as five years of service as they’ve been plagued by reliability issues and a lack of a well-defined mission.

At least one of the weapons planned for the Trump class – the rail gun – will need to be rescued from the scrap heap if it’s to be used on the battleships. The Navy cancelled its rail gun program in 2021, when technical challenges proved too difficult to overcome.

Rail gun tech uses electromagnetic power to propel a hardened projectile at speeds far higher than current weapon systems - but it requires huge amounts of power and most programs around the world have made little progress so far towards a commercially viable, reliable weapon.

Schuster says the Trump administration also needs to make some changes in management if it wants the Trump class to be successful.

“This project will be managed by NAVSEA (Naval Sea Systems Command), an organization and staff that has screwed up every surface warship program of this century,” he said.

“I believe Trump must clean house in that organization if he wants any shipbuilding program to succeed.”

Patalano says there’s a further problem within the Navy: crewing the new larger vessels, which the service expected to have 650 to 850 sailors aboard.

“The US Navy is not known for being at the forefront of automation and innovative solutions in terms of more compact crew management.”

Doing so “will require a cultural shift – in light of other new classes being built – of no trifling proportions,” Patalano said.

The future naval battlefield

Should the Navy be able to get a fleet of Trump-class battleships into the water, there’s still a question of whether they’ll be suitable for the missions at hand.

That’s a question being posed of the current jewels of the US fleet – its aircraft carriers. Can the massive ships – about 1,100 feet long, the length of three football fields – survive a conflict with a peer adversary like China?

The Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) boasts the DF-26 intermediate range ballistic missile, nicknamed the “carrier killer” because it was designed to take out the US flattops at distances far from the Chinese mainland well before the US carriers’ fighter jets could engage Chinese targets.

Some analysts say Washington should be focusing on large numbers of small naval vessels, capable of carrying a few missiles or drones each, and dispersing them across a vast range of waterways, negating Beijing’s advantage in missile numbers by presenting too many targets to handle.

An AJX002 unmanned underwater vehicles is seen during a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan and the end of World War II, in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, on September 3, 2025. - Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

A 2023 Defense Department factsheet notes how Washington is making its forces in the Pacific “more mobile, distributed, resilient, and lethal” to deter adversaries and reassure allies.

Like the carriers, large battleships could be putting too much firepower on one platform, critics say.

“The advantages of small battleships and unmanned systems are that the quantity can be increased at a relatively low cost and viability can be increased by dispersing risk across multiple platforms,” said Yu Jihoon, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses and former South Korean submarine officer.

And large ships aren’t only vulnerable to missiles, some say. There’s also a question of how they can deal with drones, cheap unmanned platforms in the air and on and below the sea, that Ukraine has shown during its war with Russia can at least disable if not sink surface ships and submarines alike.

China displayed an array of undersea naval drones at a military parade in Beijing in September, watched by leader Xi Jinping, who was flanked by Russian leader Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Writing on the website Naval News this month, analyst H I Sutton said large Chinese drones could be used to lay mines that could choke off US naval ports around the Pacific. If the proposed US battleships can’t get to sea, they’re not going to be able to bring their offensive firepower into play.

Change has to start somewhere

That’s a long list of challenges to the proposed Trump-class battleship program, but analysts say Washington should not be counted out.

After all, as Trump said in his speech on Monday, this is the country that ramped up military production enough during World War II to turn out multiple ships in a single day.

Schuster sees a more recent example, from the 1960s.

“I think Trump is trying to achieve a maritime equivalent to JFK’s call for a space program. Remember, the Soviets seemed to be ahead of us in space, a direct threat to our national security” before Washington launched the Apollo program that saw an American walk on the moon on July 20, 1969.

But Schuster doesn’t think the US can do it alone this time. Allies are needed, something difficult to manage when it comes to the laws governing current US naval shipbuilding.

“The PLAN is nearing the ability to challenge our access to the Western Pacific, a direct and clear threat to our national security. Since it also poses a threat to Japan and South Korea, enlisting their help to meet that challenge is a necessary solution to the problem,” Schuster said.

That allied cooperation is in early stages, but seeds have been planted. Trump on Monday praised South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean, which is investing billions into the Philly Shipyard, which could be building future US Navy ships.

CNN’s Gawon Bae contributed to this report.

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