Rumors and controversy have flared in the wake of the firing of now-former Naval Secretary John Phelan. The White House offered no explanation, and while many have been proposed, one of the key reasons may have involved the difficulties of delivering on President Donald Trump’s demand for two new “Trump-class” battleships to be designed and built by 2029. According to military historian and expert Max Boot, such an undertaking is not only an impossible “waste of time and money,” but serves no purpose other than to satisfy “the president’s insatiable ego.”
Trump first announced his intention to build such ships in December, explaining that he’d been inspired by a 1950s documentary series about the U.S. battleships of WWII. At the time, he declared that his new ships would be “beautiful,” “the fastest, the biggest and by far — 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.” To build them, the Defense Department has requested a record-setting budget of $1.5 trillion, which includes $1.8 billion for the ships — a “mere downpayment,” as the eventual cost of the ships is expected to be roughly ten times that.
But, writes Boot, “there is a good reason why the Navy hasn’t built a battleship since 1944: These massive surface vessels were already an anachronism in the days of propeller-driven airplanes and dumb bombs. They are all the more outdated at a time when they would be easily detected by satellite surveillance and become a fat target for drones, submarines, jet aircraft and all kinds of missiles.”
Boot explains that even the U.S. Navy isn’t quite sure how the new Trump ships would fit into modern warfare. As the War Zone notes, “The Navy is … still fleshing out how it plans to employ the Trump class battleships operationally.” What’s more, the Navy is trying to figure out how the ships would be armed, but the plans call for the inclusion of weapons that don’t even exist yet.
“Yet somehow,” writes Book, “this hypothetical warship with nonexistent weapons is supposed to start construction in fiscal 2028.”
Beyond the exorbitant spending request, the project raises the question of how funding can be best spent. Trump has already spent billions on his ambitious Golden Dome missile defense system that has so far gone nowhere “because it isn’t technically feasible.” At the same time, “Trump’s reckless war with Iran has forced the Pentagon to burn through its stockpiles of sophisticated missiles,” which now must be replaced at great cost. On top of that, there are looming concerns about waste and corruption in the defense budget, particularly since the president’s son Eric “bragged last week that a company he invested in just received a $24 million Pentagon investment to build humanoid robots.”
With all this in mind, “it’s easy to question whether the administration’s priorities make sense.”
“Congress should stop deferring to Trump and start doing its job by taking a hard look at the Pentagon’s budget request,” concludes Boot. “If it does, the first things lawmakers ought to slash would be the Trump-class battleship and the Golden Dome. The defense budget should be tailored to the nation’s security needs, not to the president’s insatiable ego.”