The Golden Fleet’s Battleship Will Never Sail
Commentary by
Mark F. Cancian
Published December 23, 2025
On December 22, President Trump
announced a new class of “battleships” that will be 100 times more powerful than previous battleships and larger than any other surface combatant on the oceans. The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion. However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail. 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. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.
Design: The ship’s design will take many years. At the “
30,000 to 40,000” tons cited by the president, the ship is much larger than anything the United States has built in the last 80 years, other than aircraft carriers. The truncated DDG-1000 class (only three built) displaced 15,000 tons but still
took 11 years from program initiation (2005) to commissioning of the first ship (2016). The battleship will be more than twice as large and more complicated—nuclear-capable with directed-energy weapons. The first ship, USS
Defiant (BBG-1), is likely to commission in the early- to mid-2030s, assuming it is built at all.
Cost: The cost will be extremely high. The DDG-51 class flight III (the current version of this destroyer class) displaces 9,000 tons and costs $2.8 billion each. A ship four times as large would not cost four times as much, but would still be much more expensive. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a future destroyer of 14,500 tons would cost
$4.4 billion or $300,000 per ton. That would imply a battleship cost of about $9.1 billion, allowing for some economies of scale. Lead ships are typically 50 percent more expensive than the average, so BBG 1 would likely cost $13.5 billion, about as much as an aircraft carrier.
The cost might be even higher because of inflation in the shipbuilding sector. For example, building the battleship will require thousands of experienced shipyard workers, even as there is a
labor shortage, and shipyards are bidding against each other for personnel.
Concept of Operations: The Navy has been moving toward a distributed operations model, in which fleet assets are spread out and connected by a network, maximizing fires by coordinating many different sensors and shooters. This proposal would go in the other direction, building a small number of large, expensive, and potentially vulnerable assets.
Several other points on the battleship are worth noting.
- First, is it really a battleship? Nothing prevents the president from using the term. However, it is usually reserved for the historical type that had big guns and heavy armor. This ship will have neither. Its guns will likely be the standard five-inch (projectile weight 55 pounds) rather than the battleship’s 16-inch (projectile weight over 2,000 pounds). Large surface combatants armed with missiles are typically described as guided missile battle cruisers (BCG), like Russia’s Kirov class ships.
- The ships will be designated a guided missile battleship, BBG, a new type. “BB” designates a battleship; “G” means guided-missile armed. The last of the Iowa-class battleships to enter service was the USS Wisconsin (BB-64). The first of this new class will be BBG-1, Defiant. The second ship is unnamed, but will likely be named soon, given the program’s high visibility.
- Calling this the “Trump class” breaks several naming conventions, such as not naming ships after living persons and naming the class after the lead ship. For example, the Arleigh Burke class is named after the lead ship, the Arleigh Burke DDG-51. However, recent administrations of both parties have flaunted these conventions to make political points.
- These would be “the largest [surface combatants] ever built.” The ships will, indeed, be very large, larger than any surface combatant sailing today. However, at 30,000 to 40,000 tons, the ships will be smaller than the Iowa-class battleships, which displaced about 55,000 tons.
- The new battleships will be “100 times” as powerful as the old battleships. Such comparisons are problematic because the ships are so different. The old battleships had heavy armor and big guns, so they could slug it out with similar ships at relatively short ranges (up to 15 miles). The new battleships, like existing destroyers and cruisers, will fire long-range munitions that can reach hundreds of miles. So, the new battleship’s range could be estimated to produce 100 times the effectiveness in some situations. However, if the old battleship and the new battleship were put a few miles apart, the old battleship would chew up the new one because its weapons were designed for that fight.
- The Navy will commit to 2 of these ships, then 10, and eventually perhaps a total of 20–25. This is a risky acquisition strategy because ships get much cheaper the more that are built. The object lesson is the DDG-1000 class, which was originally intended to number 18–24, later cut back to 10, and finally reduced to 3 ships. The BBG program will replicate this contraction if it fails. The cost per DDG-1000 rose from an estimated $2.3 billion to $3.6 billion (fiscal year 2005 dollars)—$5.6 billion in FY 2025 dollars. That excludes $14.4 billion in development costs (FY 2025 dollars).
- The president criticized warships that are ugly, even though they were stealthy. He was likely referring to the DG-1000 class, which has specialized surfaces to deflect radar but does not look very imposing. Apparently, aesthetics will now be a design criterion for Navy shipbuilding.
- The BBG will carry the new nuclear missile—the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile. The Biden administration had tried to cancel this program, but Congress overruled them. Deployment of nuclear weapons on surface ships ended in 1991 but was common during the Cold War. Deploying nuclear weapons on ships requires minor design adjustments, such as a dedicated magazine. The major issues are policy, whether an additional nuclear platform is needed, and whether sacrificing some conventional capability for nuclear capability is a worthwhile trade.
- The Navy will use artificial intelligence (AI) to help design the ship. That’s sensible, given the power of such tools. However, AI is not a magic wand. Complex designs take time to produce; big and complex ships cost a lot.
- The picture in the background of the press conference showed a ship much like the DDG 51 but larger. The ships are shown firing missiles, guns, and directed energy weapons. Indeed, the pictures look like they have been repurposed from a notional DDG(X)—a 2024 hypothesized follow-on to the DDG-51 class. That design also had two superstructures, with an enclosed main mast on the forward superstructure. The DOD announcement says that the BBG class replaces the notional DDG(X).
- President Trump has long been fascinated by battleships. He suggested reactivating them in his September 30, 2025, speech at Quantico to the assembled generals and admirals. The president’s December 22 remarks indicated that the Navy had pointed out that the 10 existing U.S. battleships were all museums. This new battleship idea likely arose when the avenue of reactivating World War II battleships was closed.
Several non-battleship issues arose relating to the Navy, shipbuilding, and military operations.
- The president said there will be a new class of aircraft carrier. This is odd since the Ford class is new. The USS Ford, the lead ship, was commissioned in 2017. Three more are under construction. The previous Nimitz class totaled 10 ships built over 40 years. It seems too early for a new carrier class.
- The president referenced Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet of 1907–1909 (“white” referred to the fact that ships had been painted white to deal with the heat of the tropics in an era before air conditioning). The fleet circumnavigated the globe to show that the United States had arrived as a world naval power. Trump wants to send the same message.
- Both the president and Secretary Hegseth referenced acquisition reforms. These are serious and deserve their own analysis, as other CSIS scholars are doing.
- In his December 22 remarks, the president stated that there had been a 2 percent reduction in drug smuggling by sea as a result of the administration’s anti-drug naval campaign. He went on to say that “we’ll be starting the same program on land. . . . If they want to come by land, they’re going to end up having a big problem. They’re going to get blown to pieces.” There was no elaboration. Central American countries, particularly Mexico, are likely very nervous about what this might mean.
- Finally, the president referenced the new small surface combatant program. The administration canceled the Constellation class due to cost growth and schedule delays, and announced that a new class would be based on the Coast Guard Homeland Security Cutter (HSC). Although using an existing design is sensible, the HSC will need many modifications to change its primary mission from law enforcement to warfighting. The Constellation class failed because the Navy made too many changes to the existing European design. The Navy now risks going down the same path.
The administration has rightly highlighted the need to build more ships, and the 2026
reconciliation bill adds $29.2 billion to do that. However, a BBG class is extremely high risk. When the full cost and schedule become known, the program will almost certainly be canceled. However, that may be after spending several years and several billion dollars.
The Navy needs to build ships now rather than begin long development programs that will take years to produce usable capability, if they ever do. Far better to upgrade existing, proven designs and ramp up their production rates. That’s the way to reach the higher production levels that President Trump cited in his speech and to expand the U.S. presence on the world’s oceans.
Mark F. Cancian (Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, ret.) is a senior adviser with the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).
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