President Donald Trump announced a new class of battleships to build out what he has dubbed the Navy’s “Golden Fleet” that he says will be “the fastest, the biggest, and by far — 100 times — more powerful than any battleship ever built.”
“We’re calling it the Golden Fleet that we’re building for the United States Navy. As you know, we’re desperately in need of ships. Our ships, some of them have gotten old and tired and obsolete,” Trump said.
“As commander in chief, it’s my great honor to announce that I have approved a plan for the Navy to begin the construction of two brand new, very large, the largest we’ve ever built, battleships. You know, we used to build the Iowa, the Missouri, the Wisconsin, the Alabama and many others. We had big battleships. These are bigger, but they will have 100 times the — they’ll be 100 times the force, the power,” Trump added later.
The president rolled out two ships, but said the administration’s goal was to build 20 to 25 of them.
The battleship was a type of large warship that went out of service in the early 1990s.
There was no word on what the battleships will cost. The Pentagon referred reporters to the Navy, which said that has yet to be determined.
“Design studies are ongoing to refine Navy cost estimates,” a Navy spokesperson said.
Retired Navy Adm. Mark Montgomery, a senior director at the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said he suspects the first battleship could easily top $10 billion to design, build and deploy.
Trump noted that the Navy will lead the project but that he will be involved in consulting on this project, saying that he’s “a very aesthetic” person.
He also touted the increased lethality and technical aspects of the vessels.
“They’ll also have hypersonic weapons, many hypersonic weapons, state of the art, electric rail guns, and even the high-powered lasers that you’ve been starting to read about,” he said. “We have lasers where you aim the laser at a target, it just wipes it out. We’re going to have — there’ll be the most sophisticated lasers in the world, and the most sophisticated laser in the world will be on the battleships that we’re building,” Trump said.
Montgomery called the effort to focus on a massive ship a mistake.
“These “Battleships” are behemoths and not the ships the Navy needs — the Navy needs a distributed fleet with weapons on a large fleet of minimally manned platforms to combat the Chinese threats at sea. These battleships will achieve none of these tactical goals,” he told ABC News in an email.
The new battleship is being billed as the most lethal surface warship ever constructed, a U.S. official told ABC News. They said that it will have more firepower than the planned DDG(X) that was to be the Navy’s next-generation destroyer.
The new battleship class will be a main component of the “Golden Fleet,” which is a goal by the Trump administration to restore the domestic shipbuilding industry.
The president also said that in addition to the battleships, the Navy is working on “three large aircraft carriers,” “12 to 15 brand new submarines” and fixing up Navy sites where sailors live.
The president also said he plans to meet with military contractors and tell them to build new factories, discuss production schedules and also talk about executive pay and stock buybacks at those companies.
“They want to buy back this stock. I don’t want them to buy back their stock. I want them to put the money in plant and equipment so they can build these planes fast rapidly, like immediately,” Trump said.
When asked by a reporter, Trump said that his timetable for the first of the ships to be built is the next 2 1/2 years.
A reporter also pressed him on whether these ships were built to counter China, but Trump said that they were to counter “everyone.”
