U.S. President Donald Trump’s new battleship, which he announced on Dec. 22, is to be armed with everything under the sun, including weapons systems that don’t exist yet, such as lasers and electromagnetic rail guns. Then there’s the cost of each of these ships. Estimates run as high as $10-$15 billion each, almost as much as a Ford-class aircraft carrier. And Trump wants to build 20-25 of them. Given the enormous claim these ships will make on resources that could be better spent elsewhere and the difficulties already plaguing U.S. Navy shipbuilding programs, a future President could cancel the entire class before construction even begins.
According to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Trump class battleships are supposed to put the world in awe about how powerful the U.S. is, but not everybody is so impressed. Russian military expert Dmitry Kornev sees them as little more than big, fat targets. The obvious question, he writes in RT, is “how effective would such massive ships be in a modern war? A handful of hypersonic anti-ship missiles—extremely difficult to intercept—and the ‘pride of the nation’ could be sent to the bottom. Billions of dollars would go up in smoke. In an era of space-based surveillance and advanced anti-ship weapons, the combat lifespan of such vessels could approach zero. In that case, these enormously expensive ships would be useful for little more than parades.”
If there is no war, “the investment resembles a luxury Cadillac parked in the countryside: undeniably beautiful, unmistakably expensive—and possibly useless.”
