January 9, 2026 0 Comments
Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute
By Dr. Emma Salisbury
(FPRI) — After finishing my last article on the inability of the US Navy to build frigates, I was hopeful that I could have a bit of a break before the next crisis in American naval shipbuilding. If there were ever a moment to pause, regroup, and refocus on fundamentals—getting proven hulls into the water, fielding more missile launch capability, and accelerating work on a next-generation successor to the aging Arleigh Burke destroyers—this would seem to be it. I absolutely did not predict the sudden reappearance on the horizon of the battleship.
Yet, here we are. Plans have now been unveiled for the USS Defiant, the lead ship of the so-called Trump class of guided-missile battleships. According to the concept materials released so far, this vessel would combine a sprawling arsenal of vertical launch cells, hypersonic missiles, and lasers with a forward-mounted 32-megajoule railgun. In other words, at a moment when American shipyards are struggling to produce sufficient numbers of current surface combatants, the proposed solution is to task them with building 35,000-ton “super combatants” packed with immature or outright nonexistent technologies.
Could such a ship actually work? What risks does it introduce, technologically and industrially? And perhaps most importantly, what would a return to battleships mean for American fleet structure and an already overstretched US shipbuilding sector?
A Game of Battleships
The classic battleship emerged in an era when naval power was defined by the ability to throw heavy shells over long distances and survive doing so. For decades, the battleship sat at the top of the surface combatant hierarchy, mounting the largest guns and the thickest armor, designed to engage enemy fleets in decisive engagements. By the late interwar period and into World War II, this concept had reached its zenith. The US Navy epitomized the idea of the fast battleship with the Iowa class, combining heavy armament with speeds sufficient to keep pace with aircraft carriers.
During the war itself, battleships proved adaptable. They could fight surface engagements but they also excelled at shore bombardment, where a 16in shell coming over the coastline delivered effects that few other systems could match. The US Navy further exploited their size and stability by festooning them with anti-aircraft weapons. By 1945, an Iowa-class battleship carried not only its main battery but also dozens of dual-purpose guns, Bofors, and lighter cannon, turning it into a floating fortress capable of defending an entire task force.
Despite this versatility, the postwar era was unkind to battleships. Aircraft carriers, with their unmatched power projection and flexibility, became the dominant capital ships. Guided missiles began to redefine naval combat, undermining the value of armor and big guns alike. At the same time, battleships were ruinously expensive to operate compared to the value they brought to the fleet. A World War II-era Iowa required a crew of 2,700 sailors, roughly as many personnel as a modern Ford-class carrier that displaces twice as much and delivers vastly greater combat capability. In an environment shaped by both technological change and budgetary pressure, battleships gradually faded away. By the early 1990s, they were museum pieces.
Against that historical backdrop, the emergence of the USS Defiant concept is striking. However, what has been presented so far is less a finished design than a sketch of an idea. There is some dodgy concept artand a list of headline capabilities, but no evidence of the years of iterative design work that normally precede a major warship program. Unlike programs such as DDG(X) or SSN(X), which have received sustained funding for studies and pre-design work, the Trump class appears to have materialized with no visible financial runway whatsoever. It strains credulity to believe that the US Navy’s design apparatus could produce a detailed, build-ready battleship concept in a matter of months, essentially on spare change, especially as the service has delegated so much of its in-house design capability to the shipbuilders since the end of the Cold War.
This matters for two reasons. First, it sets realistic expectations about timelines. Even if the US Navy were to commit fully tomorrow, a ship of this size and complexity would take years to design and many more to build. The first hull would almost certainly not reach the fleet until well into the late 2030s, despite a stated goal of earlier that decade. Second, it raises doubts about how settled the underlying concept really is. The ranges given for even simple matters such as the ship’s length are wide. When programs move this quickly from announcement to advocacy, they are driven more by top-down vision than by bottom-up engineering reality.
And now, the question troubling all of my fellow rivet-counters: Is Defiant actually a battleship? In modern naval taxonomy, the answer depends on how seriously one takes classifications. Today, ship designations often reflect politics and tradition as much as capability. The Germans, for example, famously call almost everything in their fleet a frigate. If the US Navy wishes to call a vessel a battleship, they can. By traditional standards, however, the picture is murkier. Defiant’s dimensions place it firmly in battleship territory: Its ranges for length and beam are comparable to an Iowa, and its speed appears similar. Its displacement is lower, largely because it lacks the heavy armor on an Iowa, but it would still outweigh many historic battleships.
Where the analogy breaks down is in armament and role. Traditional battleships revolved around their main guns; everything else was secondary. As Secretary of the Navy John Phelan said during the announcement, “The Iowa was designed to go on the attack with the biggest guns, and that’s exactly what will define the Trump-class battleships: offensive firepower from the biggest guns of our era.” However, Defiant’s guns, including its railgun, are more like secondary systems. Its primary offensive power, from the specifications given, lies in missiles. In that sense, it more closely resembles an idea the US Navy explored in the 1990s: the arsenal ship, a massive hull packed with missile cells intended to supplement carrier strike groups or operate independently as a firepower hub.
Even by that standard, the Trump class is puzzling. If its purpose is indeed to deliver missiles, it does so very inefficiently. Compared to a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, which carries 122 Mk 41 cells on a 10,000-ton hull, Defiant reportedly offers only a marginal increase in vertical launch capacity (probably around 6 extra cells) despite being at least three times larger. It adds hypersonic missiles, but drops other launchers in the process. The result is a ship that uses enormous displacement for negligible gains in missile firepower.
What Is It Good For?
The answer seems to be that the Trump class is intended to do a bit of everything. It includes large aviation facilities capable of supporting helicopters and V-22 Ospreys, hinting at an amphibious or special operations role. It is designed as a command ship, with extensive command-and-control infrastructure. It reportedly supports nuclear-armed cruise missiles, making it a secondary strategic delivery platform. It is also envisioned as a host for multiple directed-energy systems, from laser dazzlers to high-powered defensive lasers, capped by the railgun. It is simultaneously pitched as a platform for extremely long-range hypersonic strikes and as a gunship that would need to close with its targets to exploit the railgun’s strengths. The conceptual coherence of this mix is, being generous, unclear.
The Trump class also depends on several technologies that are not operational today. Railguns and high-energy lasers have made progress, but their integration into a front-line warship at this scale remains unproven. If those systems fail to mature on schedule, the program risks delays, truncation, or the fate of the Zumwalt class, whose advanced gun systems never became usable. There is also the strategic risk of betting on the wrong technology. Incremental improvements in missiles, sensors, and networks are familiar terrain; pivoting toward a railgun-centric vision is a much riskier bet.
Size compounds the problem. A 35,000-ton surface combatant demands more in terms of workforce, infrastructure, and capital than a destroyer. The president has specified that the ships will be built in the United States, but US shipyards optimized for destroyer construction may not be able to handle a vessel of this scale. Expanding or upgrading those facilities would take time and money, potentially displacing other priorities such as amphibs or carriers.
That context makes me even more concerned about the news in the announcement that the Trump-class battleships are not an addition to the planned fleet architecture but a replacement for DDG(X). The next-generation destroyer is dead, and its intended capabilities are to be folded into the battleship instead. The future surface combatant mix would thus consist of continued Burke production, a frigate at the low end, and these massive guided-missile battleships at the high end.
The implications are profound. DDG(X), for all its uncertainties, was at least sized to fit existing destroyer yards and represented an evolutionary step. A battleship-sized replacement resets the clock. Design work would start largely from scratch, industrial planning would have to be rethought, and schedules would slip. All of this comes at a moment when the US Navy is about to lose the Ticonderoga-class cruisers and their missile capacity, as well as the converted Ohio-class SSGNs. A gap in missile launch capacity is looming, and delays only make it worse.
Lethality Opportunity Cost
The US Navy’s problem is not a lack of imagination; it is a lack of time. It needs more lethality, quickly and affordably. A multi-mission 35,000-ton ship does not obviously meet that requirement. Even if the Trump class eventually performs as advertised, the opportunity cost is enormous. Every dollar spent on a battleship is a dollar not spent on missiles, submarines, destroyers, or autonomous systems. In an era of constrained budgets and intense competition, those tradeoffs matter.
The return of the battleship, whether real or rhetorical, is making headlines, but for the wrong reasons. In the unforgiving arithmetic of naval force structure, spectacle matters far less than timely delivery of usable combat power. While the program may have a chance of making it through the congressional appropriations process under this administration, the smart money would be on it being cancelled as soon as Trump is out of office, leaving the Trump class as a pointless white elephant at the significant opportunity cost of years and dollars taken away from the path toward a balanced and lethal American fleet. Build destroyers instead.
The US Navy’s problem is not a lack of imagination; it is a lack of time. It needs more lethality, quickly and affordably. A multi-mission 35,000-ton ship does not obviously meet that requirement. Even if the Trump class eventually performs as advertised, the opportunity cost is enormous. Every dollar spent on a battleship is a dollar not spent on missiles, submarines, destroyers, or autonomous systems. In an era of constrained budgets and intense competition, those tradeoffs matter.
The return of the battleship, whether real or rhetorical, is making headlines, but for the wrong reasons. In the unforgiving arithmetic of naval force structure, spectacle matters far less than timely delivery of usable combat power. While the program may have a chance of making it through the congressional appropriations process under this administration, the smart money would be on it being cancelled as soon as Trump is out of office, leaving the Trump class as a pointless white elephant at the significant opportunity cost of years and dollars taken away from the path toward a balanced and lethal American fleet. Build destroyers instead.
About the author: Dr. Emma Salisbury is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s National Security Program, an Associate Fellow at the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre, and a Contributing Editor at War on the Rocks.
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This article was published at FPRI
Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute
Founded in 1955, FPRI (http://www.fpri.org/) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests and seeks to add perspective to events by fitting them into the larger historical and cultural context of international politics.
Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute
Founded in 1955, FPRI (http://www.fpri.org/) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests and seeks to add perspective to events by fitting them into the larger historical and cultural context of international politics.
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