Trump's $23 billion ship will be outdated before it even hits water

The first proposed Trump-class battleship now has a price tag: $23 billion.

This cost, as assessed by the Congressional Budget Office, will garner a lot of attention. But the primary concern for policymakers and citizens alike should be the complexity of the ship’s design.

The U.S. Navy has a poor shipbuilding record in the 21st century. The Zumwalt-class destroyer, the Littoral Combat Ship, and the Constellation-class frigate have been complete failures . The final verdict of the Ford-class aircraft carrier is not yet in, but when the ship’s crew can’t even rely on the sewage system to work properly, the case isn’t looking too good.

It becomes clear reading through the CBO’s report that Navy officials in Washington have learned nothing over the past 25 years from their shipbuilding mistakes. In typical Washington fashion, the new ship is being touted as “the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” as President Donald Trump put it. In practical terms, the ship will be armed with “antiair, land-attack, and antiship missiles, hypersonic missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, large lasers, and a rail gun (a weapon that uses electromagnetic energy to fire nonexplosive projectiles at hypersonic speeds),” according to the CBO.

All of these systems will require a tremendous amount of electrical power to operate. To meet this challenge, the new ship will also be nuclear-powered . The addition of a nuclear reactor will dramatically increase both the cost and complexity of the ship’s construction.

The original sin of all the Navy’s 21st century shipbuilding failures is a lack of design discipline. The architects of each program attempted to incorporate every gadget the technologists could imagine, several of which (including cutting-edge rail guns) remain unproven to this day. Excess complexity drives up costs and delays delivery, often by years.

Officials compounded that essential mistake when they began building ships before the underlying technology had been developed. The practice of beginning construction before the development process ends is known as concurrency . When the overlap between manufacturing and development is too great, as it has been with acquisition programs like the Littoral Combat Ship and the USS Gerald R. Ford , costs rise and schedules slip because it becomes more difficult to incorporate the new technology into work that has already been completed.

A glance at America’s shipbuilding capacity suggests that the construction timeline for the battleship program is also unrealistic. Navy leaders plan to buy 15 of the new ships between 2028 and 2056. But naval construction is already years behind schedule.

The next Ford-class aircraft carrier, for example, is already five years late , yet the Pentagon hopes to assemble the new battleships at the same Newport News shipbuilding dock used to build aircraft carriers. The Navy’s current fleet of 289 ships is already far short of the legally required 355 ships . Attempting to build the largest and most complex surface warship in nearly a century hardly seems like the proper course of action to expand the fleet and alleviate the strain on the Navy’s already harried sailors.

The size of the fleet matters because it directly impacts the quality of life and service of the nation’s sailors. The U.S. Navy has played an integral role in maintaining freedom of navigation around the globe since the end of World War II. Having fewer ships in the fleet means that the existing ships and their crews must work longer and harder to meet the Navy’s operational demand. Since leaders in Washington show few signs of reducing the number of missions the Navy must perform, adopting a shipbuilding plan that will see the fleet continue to shrink for the foreseeable future makes little sense.

The fact that the battleship program is projected out over the next 30 years also deserves scrutiny. Instituting a warship program of this size to span three decades at a time when uncrewed vessels and anti-ship missiles are proliferating means that officials today believe a large surface warfare ship will remain viable throughout that timespan. That is a bold assumption to make. It is doubtful many people in 1996 would have anticipated the Ukrainians effectively denying the Russian fleet the use of the Black Sea with uncrewed vessels and shore-based missiles. A $23 billion American battleship will be an inviting target for submarines, anti-ship missiles, and hypersonic weapons.

The current National Security Strategy released in November 2025 calls for the United States to concentrate on defending the Western Hemisphere. Building the largest surface combatant ship since World War II, armed with conventional, hypersonic, and nuclear-tipped missiles, is hardly necessary to defend the seas close to home. Such a ship is designed specifically to project military power around the globe. The battleship plan provides more evidence that the national security establishment will do precisely what it wants to do, no matter what defense strategy the government adopts.