Mark F. Cancian
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.
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