Trump announces plans for a new Navy warship and ‘Golden Fleet’ : NPR

President Trump leaves after speaking at his Mar-a-Lago club Monday in Palm Beach, Florida.

Alex Brandon/AP

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Alex Brandon/AP

WASHINGTON — President Trump announced a bold plan for the Navy to build a large new warship he calls a “battleship” as part of a broader vision to create a “golden fleet.”

“They will be the fastest, the biggest and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump said during the announcement at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

According to Trump, the ship, the first of which will be called the USS Defiant, will be longer and larger than the Iowa-class battleships of World War II and will be armed with hypersonic missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, rail guns and high-powered lasers — all technologies that are in various stages of development by the Navy.

The announcement comes just a month after the Navy scrapped plans to build a new small warship, citing growing delays and cost overruns, deciding instead to go with a modified version of a Coast Guard cutter that was in production until recently. The Sea Service also failed to build its other newly designed ships, such as the new Ford-class aircraft carrier and Columbia-class submarines, on time and on budget.

Meanwhile, the Navy has struggled to implement some of the technologies that Trump says will be aboard the new ship.

The Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars and spent more than 15 years trying to install a railgun aboard a ship before finally abandoning its efforts in 2021.

Laser technology has seen more success in recent years on Navy ships, but its use remains limited. A system designed to blind or disable drone sensors is now aboard eight destroyers after eight years of development.

Developing nuclear cruise missile capabilities or deploying them on ships may also violate the nonproliferation treaties the United States signed with Russia.

A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing plans, told The Associated Press that design efforts are currently underway for the new ship and construction is expected to begin in the early 2030s.

Both Trump and Navy Secretary John Phelan have spoken of the new Trump-class warship as a spiritual successor to 20th-century battleships, but historically that term referred to a very specific type of ship: a large, heavily armored vessel armed with massive cannons designed to bombard other ships or shore targets.

This type of ship was at its peak during World War II, and the largest of the American battleships, the Iowa class, weighed approximately 60,000 tons. But after World War II, the role of battleships in modern fleets quickly declined in favor of aircraft carriers and long-range missiles. The U.S. Navy upgraded four Iowa-class battleships in the 1980s with cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, as well as modern radars, but by the 1990s all four were decommissioned.

According to a recently created website for the “Golden Fleet”, this new “guided missile battleship” is expected to be about the same size as the Iowa-class battleships, but weigh only about half, around 35,000 tons, and have much smaller crews – between 650 and 850 sailors.

Its main weapons will also be missiles, not large naval guns.

Trump has long held strong opinions on specific aspects of the Navy’s fleet, sometimes with an eye toward retaining older technologies instead of modernizing them.

During his first term, he unsuccessfully called for a return to steam catapults to launch jets from the Navy’s newer aircraft carriers instead of the more modern electromagnetic system.

He also complained to Phelan about the appearance of Navy destroyers and lamented that Navy ships were covered in rust.

Phelan told senators during his confirmation hearing that Trump “sent me numerous text messages very late at night, sometimes after one (a.m.) in the morning” about “rusted ships or ships in a yard, asking me what am I doing about it.”

During a visit to a shipyard that worked on the now-canceled Constellation-class frigate in 2020, Trump said he personally changed the ship’s design.

“I looked at it, I said, ‘This is a horrible ship, let’s make it beautiful,'” Trump said at the time.

He said on Monday that he would also play a direct role in the design of this new warship.

“The United States Navy will lead the design of these ships with me, because I am a very aesthetic person,” Trump said.

Phelan said the new USS Defiant “will inspire awe and respect for the American flag every time it enters a foreign port.”