What happened
President Donald Trump yesterday announced he was working with the U.S. Navy to design and build a “Trump class” fleet of “battleships” that would form a centerpiece of America’s revamped “Golden Fleet.” The new warships will “be the fastest, the biggest and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago, standing alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Navy Secretary John Phelan and renderings of the proposed vessel. The last U.S. battleship was decommissioned in 1992.
Who said what
Trump said construction would begin “almost immediately” on the first of up to 25 Trump-class ships, the USS Defiant, which would be delivered in “two and a half years.” A U.S. official told The Associated Press that construction was planned to begin in the early 2030s. “There is no funding in the current Pentagon budget” for the warships, Politico said.
The new ships, as described by Trump, “will be armed with hypersonic missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, rail guns and high-powered lasers,” the AP said, “all technologies that are in various stages of development by the Navy,” with some previously abandoned as impractical. Massive new $5 billion warships are “exactly what we don’t need” to defend “against the Chinese threat,” retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Wall Street Journal. “They are focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”
What next?
“This ship is never going to sail,” Mark Cancian, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Washington Post. He predicted it would “take four, five, six years” to just develop the ship. Trump said he would meet with defense contractors in Florida next week to accelerate production.
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