President Donald Trump’s impulse is to believe that bigger is always better. Still, U.S. military procurement must be laser-focused on the extraordinary challenge of deterring and, if necessary, defeating China in a major war.
The Trump-class battleship fundamentally undermines that focus. It would be very poorly suited for a war with China or a revitalized Russian navy. It would be a tremendous drain on strained resources and shipyards. And if war with China ever came, it would end up as a bloody testament to the folly of putting ego before military necessity.
The first problem is that of cost. The Congressional Budget Office last week estimated that the first ship of the class, the proposed USS Defiant, would cost $23.4 billion to construct. Each ship thereafter is estimated to cost $18 billion, with the Navy planning to procure 15 ships in total. Contrast this figure with the proposed guided-missile destroyer DDG(X) class that the Trump-class is now set to replace. With the CBO estimating a unit cost of $4.4 billion for each DDG(X) warship, four DDG(X)s could be built for just one Trump-class battleship. And while two DDG(X)s could be constructed each year, completing the significantly larger Trump-class vessels would take longer. An additional problem is that Trump-class warships would rely upon nuclear shipyards, undermining the construction of already heavily delayed submarines. Adm. Sam Paparo of U.S. Pacific Command says having more attack submarines is his warfighting priority.
The Trump-class also loses out on that which the president claims is its biggest strength: armaments.
Each Trump-class warship would have 200 missile cells, 12 hypersonic weapon cells, nuclear-launched missiles, and an array of other laser and railgun weapons. This is very potent firepower. But the DDG(X) would be no pleasure yacht. Each ship of this class would have 96 missile cells, or 64 if the remainder were substituted for 12 hypersonic weapon cells. Regardless, four DDG(X) ships would give the Navy either two times the missile cells as one Trump-class battleship, or 28% more missile cells and 400% more hypersonic weapons cells.
Foresight matters when it comes to the prospective Pacific fight. The potency of distributed firepower is why the Chinese military has focused so heavily on building out its Type-055 guided missile destroyer fleet. Beijing knows that getting figurative and literal bang for buck means having more potent vessels. That speaks to the Trump-class’s most critical failing: survivability.
This is not the 1940s. Facing what would be a saturation of extremely high-speed weapons enabled by advanced radar, sonar, and space sensors, the Navy needs warships that can fight and evade amid an onslaught of enemy attacks. It needs redundancy in the fleet so that when one warship is crippled or sunk, that loss doesn’t translate to a capability crisis. Hence why the Navy has been so focused on building out large numbers of unmanned surface and submarine drones. It plans for their use in higher-risk missions closer to Chinese forces and to divert some attention from the manned force. This is no small concern. The Chinese military has a vast number of highly capable anti-ship missiles. Which is also why the U.S. military has invested significantly in means of tricking the Chinese military into attacking nonexistent or dispensable drone vessels.
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The Trump-class battleships represent the literal antithesis of this thinking. Yes, they provide heavy armaments and command and control nodes. But they also provide prestige targets, important in Chinese military doctrine, that would be highly vulnerable to saturation attacks. And due to the kinetic energy born of its 7,500-plus-mph terminal attack speed, just one Chinese YJ-20 hypersonic weapon would almost certainly take a Trump-class ship out of the fight. Or worse.
In turn, unless Trump seeks vast at-sea graveyards in service of a lost war, these ships should be removed from the planning board.