Trump’s new battleship plan could transform the US Navy – or sink it

President Donald Trump’s announcement of a new class of battleships bearing his name puts a fresh spotlight on a US naval shipbuilding program that has fallen short on delivering the new warships on time and on budget in recent years, something Trump himself pointed out in his speech from Mar-a-Lago on Monday.

“We make the greatest equipment in the world, by far, nobody’s even close. But we don’t produce them fast enough,” Trump said, as he announced he would meet soon with top US military contractors to ramp up production for the new battleships and other weapons programs.

But at least in the battleship plan, the Navy would seem to be swimming upstream, with construction of the vessels themselves and some of the weapon systems the service says would be aboard.

Here’s what to consider about the proposed “Trump-class” battleships:

The vision

A US Navy fact sheet released Monday says the Trump class will be “the most lethal warship to ever be built.”

With a length of up to 880 feet and a displacement of 30,000 to 40,000 tons, they’ll also be the biggest surface combatants the US Navy has constructed since World War II.

Those battleships, like the renowned USS Missouri, which hosted the Japanese surrender in 1945, were 887 feet long and displaced around 58,000 tons.
The biggest surface combatants in the US Navy fleet now are the Zumwalt destroyers, which displace 15,000 tons.

As far as large complex ships go, the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS John F Kennedy, has slipped about two years behind its scheduled delivery date, which was July of this year. Those delays have been attributed to new landing and weapons elevator systems which the service is still trying to get certified.