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President Trump’s new class of battleships, which are envisioned to anchor the U.S. Navy’s “Golden Fleet,” are expected to cost around $275 billion to build, according to a government report released Wednesday.
The first of 15 ships, the USS Defiant, is projected to cost around $23.4 billion to construct, with each subsequent vessel costing about $18 billion, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis said.
The first battleship could take eight years or longer to construct.
The new class of battleships, which Trump unveiled in December, was initially set to be powered by gas turbine engines, which are on cruisers and destroyers. Later, the president said the vessels would be propelled with nuclear reactors.
“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump said in December, adding that the vessels would weigh more than 30,000 tons.
The Navy requested a $377 billion budget for next year, which includes nearly $66 billion for shipbuilding.
The president aimed for the new ships to be built by 2028, a timeline that industry experts said would be unlikely.
“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,” Mark Cancian, the senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Defense and Security Department, wrote in late December. “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”
Trump fired his Navy secretary, John Phelan, in April in part over not making enough progress in constructing the battleships.
“He had some conflicts with some other people, mostly as to building and buying new ships. I’m very aggressive in the new shipbuilding, and somehow he just didn’t get along with them. He’s an excellent guy. I think he would have gotten along great with me. I didn’t really deal with him too much,” the president said of Phelan at the time.
The Navy has tried and failed to build ships on budget and on time. In November, the service branch canceled the Constellation-class frigate program.
“The Navy does not currently plan to have Bath Iron Works, in Maine, or Ingalls Shipbuilding, in Mississippi, perform the final assembly of the battleship, even though those shipyards have built all of the Navy’s large surface combatants over the past 40 years,” the CBO said in the report. “During that time, no other shipyard has performed that work, although in recent years, Bath and Ingalls have outsourced small amounts of work to other facilities to speed construction in the DDG-51 destroyer program.”
The analysis was completed at the request of Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee.
“While we continue to see too many Pentagon programs burdened by cost overruns, delays, and unrealistic promises that fail to meet reality, Congress cannot afford to commit to another massive military boondoggle that will only succeed in filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex,” Merkley said in a statement Wednesday. “I will work with my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee to reject moving forward with this wasteful project, and instead invest in programs that help families thrive.”
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Wednesday that Trump’s Golden Fleet “doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s not the way warfare is going to be done,” Reed told reporters.
Reed said that “some” people have suggested that such ships are needed if you can mount long-range missiles on them to “then stay out of a kill zone and [don’t] get hit.”
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