On December 22, 2025, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. President Donald Trump, flanked by Secretary of the Navy John Phelan (R), announced the U.S. Navy’s new Golden Fleet initiative, unveiling a new class of frigates.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images
On Monday, US President Donald Trump announced plans for a new “Trump-class” battleship, declaring it would be “100 times the fastest, largest and far more powerful than any battleship ever built.”
He praised the ships as “some of the most lethal surface combatants,” and promised they would “help maintain America’s military superiority, (and) strike fear in America’s adversaries around the world.”
But there’s one obvious problem. That means battleships have been outdated for decades. The last ship was built more than 80 years ago, and the U.S. Navy retired the last Iowa-class ship nearly 30 years ago.
Battleships, once a symbol of naval power with their huge guns, have long since been supplanted by aircraft carriers and modern destroyers equipped with long-range missiles.
While it may be a mistake to call new surface combatants “battleships,” defense experts say some gaps remain between President Trump’s vision and modern naval warfare.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, dismissed this idea, writing in a Dec. 23 commentary that “this ship will never sail, so there is little need for such a discussion.”
He argued that the program would take too long to design, cost too much and run counter to the Navy’s distributed firepower strategy.
“Future administrations will likely cancel the program before the first ship hits the water,” Cancian said.
Bernard Lu, a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Relations, described the proposal as “first and foremost a prestigious project”.
He compared it to Japan’s World War II super battleships Yamato and Musashi, the largest in history, which were sunk by carrier-based aircraft before they could play a significant role in combat.
A photo of the Japanese Navy Yamato, the lead ship of the Yamato-class battleships that belonged to the Japanese Navy during World War II. The date is 1941 (Photo credit: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Photo 12 | Universal Images Group | Getty Images
“Historically, if you look at battleships, it’s been thought that bigger is better… (and) from a very amateur strategy standpoint, size matters. I’m really talking about size, which doesn’t necessarily matter, but in this case, to the amateur, it does matter,” Lu said.
He added that the size of the proposed battleship – more than 35,000 tons displacement and more than 840 feet long, or just over two football fields – would make it a “bomb magnet.”
“Its size and prestige value make it potentially an even more attractive target for adversaries,” Lu said.
Brian Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, suggested that President Trump may be drawn to the symbolic power of battleships, which were the most prominent symbol of naval firepower for much of the 20th century.
Completed in 1944 and the last battleship built in the United States, the USS Missouri is famous for being the scene of Japan’s surrender in 1945.
(September 2, 1945, Japanese Surrender Signers arrive on the USS Missouri to participate in the Japanese Surrender Ceremony. Tokyo Bay, U.S. Army Signal Corps. (Photo Credit: CircaImages/GHI/UniversalHistoryArchive/UniversalImagesGroupviaGettyImages)
Universal History Archive | Universal Images Group | Getty Images
Clark noted that the U.S. Navy recommissioned four World War II battleships in the 1980s as part of a 600-ship fleet expansion strategy to counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War. “This may be a time when the president believes that the United States finally had command of the seas.”
The last time a battleship saw combat was in 1991, when the converted Iowa-class battleships provided shore bombardment support to coalition forces during the First Gulf War.
Battleship Wisconsin (BB-64) fires a BGM-109 Tomahawk missile against targets in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. (Photo credit: © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
History | Corbis History | Getty Images
What’s in the name?
Clark pointed out that classification is not as important as the weapons a ship carries.
The Trump-class battleships, part of the new Golden Fleet, will be equipped with conventional artillery and missiles, as well as electronic railguns and laser weapons, according to the US Navy. It will also be able to carry nuclear missiles and hypersonic missiles.
Such ships, whether called battleships or not, function essentially like large destroyers.
But CSIS’s Cancian countered that such a design goes against the Navy’s distributed operating model, which seeks to reduce vulnerabilities by spreading firepower across many assets.
“This proposal would go in the opposite direction, building a small number of large, expensive and potentially vulnerable assets,” he wrote.
Even if a Trump-class battleship were to prove technically feasible, analysts said cost would be a critical hurdle.
Lu said the U.S. weapons program routinely exceeds schedule and budget.
The Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyers, currently the largest surface combatants at 15,000 tons, have been reduced from 32 to three due to rising costs. Most recently, the Constellation class frigates were canceled due to design and labor issues.
Clark estimated that the Trump-class would cost two to three times more than current destroyers. Arleigh Burke destroyers cost about $2.7 billion each, meaning the cost of a single battleship could exceed $8 billion, not including the huge costs of staffing and maintaining a crew.
The cost of crewing and maintaining them will further strain the Navy’s already tight budget, he added.
RSIS Loo was more critical in his assessment, calling the decision a strategic mistake. “That’s strategic arrogance, at least as far as I’m concerned.”
