President Trump announced plans Monday for a new class of battleships to be named after him. "They'll be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built," he said during the announcement at Mar-a-Lago, per the AP. The Trump-class warships would be significantly larger than today's Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, which Trump has often derided as ugly and outdated, and are envisioned as 30,000-ton "large surface combatants" built to carry future weapons such as rail guns and high-energy lasers, a defense source tells the Wall Street Journal.
Trump said artificial intelligence capabilities will be a "big factor" in the new ships, the New York Times reports. He stressed that he wants them to be built quickly, saying he plans to meet with defense contractors next week "because they're too slow." The president said he plans to take a hand in designing the new ships. "The US Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I'm a very aesthetic person," he said, per the AP. The first of the new ships will be called the USS Defiant, reports Reuters. He said the government would acquire up to 25 of the ships.
The announcement comes days after the Navy rolled out plans for a new frigate to replace the recently canceled Constellation-class program. Together, the frigates and the new battleships form the backbone of the Golden Fleet idea, which would field more large ships with long-range, potentially hypersonic missiles, plus a larger number of smaller frigates based on the Coast Guard's Legend-class National Security Cutter. At Mar-a-Lago, Navy Secretary John Phelan said the Trump-class battleships will carry the "nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile," the Times reports. "This is just one piece of the president's Golden Fleet that we're going to build," he said.
The AP notes that the term battleship has historically referred to "a large, heavily armored vessel armed with massive guns designed to bombard other ships or targets ashore"—a type of warship that declined in importance after WWII. Defense analysts say the Navy needs more powerful ships to defend aircraft carriers, though retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says the Golden Fleet is "exactly what we don't need" because the ships are "not optimized to provide lethality against the Chinese threat." "That is not what these are focused on—they are focused on the president's visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship," he tells the Journal.
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