Copyright Breaking Defense
WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump told a group of high-ranking military officers in September that he was “seriously considering” building “battleships” for the US Navy, it raised eyebrows in the naval community. True American battleships were heavily armored to fight gun battles with a peer navy and have been consigned to history since the 1990s. In their place, modern destroyers are kitted out with state-of-the-art radars and interceptors that protect the aircraft carrier and its all-important air wing, as demonstrated by the numerous engagements against the Houthis in the Red Sea. But now, the White House and Navy are reportedly in early discussions to design a new class of ships, as part of a concept the administration dubbed “Golden Fleet.” These “battleships” would displace between 15,000 and 20,000 tons — much larger than current destroyers — and be equipped with premiere offensive strike capabilities such as hypersonic weapons, according to a recent report by The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed current and former officials. The broader “Golden Fleet” concept would pair these offensive “battleships” with a myriad of smaller unmanned vessels and corvettes. Despite the concept ostensibly coming from the White House, the administration’s ideas align with a theory that has arisen from recent wargames and other analyses, according to Bryan Clark, a retired Navy officer and fellow at the Hudson Institute, who frequently works with the Pentagon as an outside consultant. At least from a strategic standpoint, the Navy’s envisioned future destroyer, DDG(X), lacks the space for the offensive firepower it may need in a future fight, he said. “To get a ship that’s able to do some offense as well as defense, you need something even bigger [than a destroyer] to have enough missile capacity or to have long-range missiles that don’t fit in the [Vertical Launching System] cell,” he said. “So, either one of those drives you to a new ship design that’s bigger than even DDG(X) was envisioned as being.” But designing and building an entirely new class of Navy ships is a prolonged and expensive exercise. If the administration follows through on the idea, analysts told Breaking Defense this new ship could cost upwards of $4 billion per copy — a big ask of the Navy’s already strained shipbuilding budget. Further, these experts said, the United States’ options for building this new ship are likely limited to two firms: HII or General Dynamics. “The interesting part of this is it’s not just a kind of fleeting presidential idea, but this is, in fact, something that does kind of resonate with what the Navy’s finding it probably needs to do with the fleet through its own work,” said Clark. “It’s an interesting juxtaposition of presidential gut [instinct] with [the] Navy’s analysis.” Spokespeople for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Navy deferred comment for this report to the White House. In response to questions for this story, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “President Trump has done more than anyone to bolster America’s maritime dominance — including by securing a $43 billion investment in the Working Families Tax Cut, establishing a White House Office of Shipbuilding, negotiating a historic deal with Finland to construct 11 new arctic cutters, and more. We have no further announcements at this time — stay tuned!” How To Price Your Warship The price tag for a warship comes down to numerous competing factors such as size, design complexity, estimated future inflation and whether or not the specific ship is first in the class. Arleigh Burke-class destroyers for instance only displace between 8,000 and 10,000 tons — about half that of Trump’s envisioned battleship — but the Navy’s propensity to maximize every inch of available space for new technology makes the Arleigh Burkes technically complex. Those factors resulted in recent DDGs costing between $2.5 and $3 billion per ship. Meanwhile, the various amphibious ship classes the Navy builds are multiple times larger than a destroyer, but their overall design complexity is lower because their primary purpose is to haul Marines and their associated platforms and gear. As a result, certain amphibious ships have come in between $2 and $3 billion per ship, depending on the class. Jonathan Page, a professor at the University of Michigan’s school for naval architecture and marine engineering, who has previously worked on various Navy shipbuilding programs, estimated the new battleship would cost between $4 to $4.5 billion. He cautioned though that his guess is making a number of assumptions about the ship’s design and other details that aren’t publicly available. He also noted that the Navy’s latest destroyers and amphibious ships are benefiting from being the third or fourth in their class. As the Government Accountability Office has previously reported, first-in-class ships are consistently more expensive than their successors because ship design problems and construction errors naturally decrease with each new vessel built. Ultimately, estimating future ship prices can be more art than science, especially when the discussions are preliminary and details are hypothetical. These discrepancies have led to the Navy’s staff frequently disagreeing with the estimates put forward by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which historically assumes much higher prices than the Pentagon — to the tune of billions. For this reason, the experts Breaking Defense spoke to offered a range of prices. Jeff Vogel, an executive at TOTE Services, suggested the lead ship’s price could be as low as $1.6 billion, with future ships nearing $1.2 billion, if the Navy learns from its past mistakes on the Constellation-class frigate program, which is suffering schedule delays and cost overruns in part due to excessive design changes. Carlton Haelig, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, predicted the new ship class would be more comparable to the Zumwalt-class destroyers, which have procurement costs between $3.5 and $4.5 billion per ship, on top of the billions that went into design and development. The Zumwalt program in particular has had significant schedule and funding issues due to the class being truncated multiple times and the Navy swapping the ship’s mission sets due to a failed effort to develop an advanced long-range munition. Haelig noted that the weapons specifically the White House is mulling for its new ship class could drive up the vessel’s overall operating cost tremendously. Zumwalt “was probably comparable in terms of complexity for a truly modernized ship of this capability,” he said. The administration is “talking about including things like a hypersonic weapons capability, possibly next-generation directed energy munitions, and then all of the defensive countermeasures that come with a ship that they’re expecting to be able to survive under fires. … These get very expensive.” New Ship, Same Shipbuilders Nearly all of the analysts Breaking Defense spoke to stated the most likely shipbuilders capable of constructing this new warship are either HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding or General Dynamics Bath Iron Works. Both companies have extensive experience building surface combatants and shipyards large enough to construct Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and in Ingalls’ case, the even larger amphibious class ships. A spokesman for Bath Iron Works told Breaking Defense, “We build what our customer requests,” and deferred other questions to the Navy. A spokesperson for HII did not respond to requests for comment by press time. American shipbuilding has seen some significant changes since Trump’s first term in the White House. The United States is more heavily leaning into the capability of its allies and partners, whether that be through the Biden administration’s ICE Pact; the current administration’s deal with Finland for icebreakers or the numerous industry-to-industry deals signed between American and South Korean companies. Asked to envision a pathway for building these new warships without solely relying on HII or GD, Vogel suggested the Navy could farm out certain component production and testing to a smaller network of yards, a concept known as “distributed shipbuilding,” which the service and industry have recently embraced. Page, the professor at the University of Michigan, suggested procuring the hull form or propulsion plant abroad and sailing it home, but he added, “Such a construct might add time [to the program schedule] … I am not confident in a solution here similar to the icebreaker pact we just struck with Finland, though, for instance.” Hunter Stires, who was an advisor to former Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, argued the service should conduct a competition between HII and BIW for any future surface combatant rather than allowing a teaming arrangement, which is currently envisioned for the DDG(X) program. He also suggested Hanwha, the South Korean conglomerate that has aggressively pursued a stronger position in the American defense industrial base, could emerge as a third option moving forward. “The Navy should seize the opportunity presented by having a world-class dual-use naval and commercial shipbuilder like Hanwha join the market. A spirited three-way competition will lead to stronger, more cost effective performance and higher output by all involved versus having just two yards in the mix,” he said, citing the company’s experience building destroyers for the Republic of Korea Navy. Haelig said the Pentagon could attempt to modify a foreign-built design, but recommended against that option due to the problems plaguing the Constellation-class, which was supposed to be derived from the Italian FREMM. As for what all of this means for the Navy’s already strained shipbuilding budget, something will have to give. Haelig noted the administration covered a large portion of the service’s shipbuilding budget this year through reconciliation, a budget trick he said was unlikely to work twice. “That sets up a situation in 2027 where there is going to be a discussion about [whether] you roll those shipbuilding costs back into the base budget?” he said. “You’re probably not going to be able to get reconciliation done, and that’s without even considering this idea that we’re going to have to start a whole new program, or series of programs, to manifest the Golden Fleet.” He continued, “I think it would cause significant debate about whether or not this is viable going forward.”
