The potential price tag for the “golden fleet” of massive, “Trump-class” battleships President Donald Trump has pushed to build since late last year has been revealed, and it’s nothing short of staggering. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, commissioning the ships would cost roughly $275 billion.
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Per the Daily Beast, “This figure is nearly double what the Navy initially estimated the fleet of warships would cost taxpayers, with the CBO also warning that the country’s shipbuilding industry could struggle even to construct them. The first ‘Trump Class’ battleship, the USS Defiant, with its planned nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile, would alone cost around $23.4 billion — an increase of more than $8 billion from the original estimate — and take about eight years to complete.” The fleet would also include another 14 ships costing an average of over $18 billion each.
The report was composed at the request of Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, who said in a statement, “At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, gas, healthcare, and child care, Congress cannot throw hundreds of billions of dollars at Trump’s ‘Golden Fleet,’ including plastering his name across a new battleship.” He added, “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.”
While Trump has claimed that the battleships would be “some of the most lethal surface warfare ships” and “the fastest, the biggest, and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” experts have noted that the plan has a “glaring problem.” As CNBC reported shortly after the president began demanding the ships, “battleships have been obsolete for decades.”
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As one military expert explained, “There is a good reason why the Navy hasn’t built a battleship since 1944: These massive surface vessels were already an anachronism in the days of propeller-driven airplanes and dumb bombs. They are all the more outdated at a time when they would be easily detected by satellite surveillance and become a fat target for drones, submarines, jet aircraft and all kinds of missiles.” Another put it more bluntly: the Trump-class battleship would be a “bomb magnet.” What’s more, “the plans call for the inclusion of weapons that don’t even exist yet.”
On top of all that, the CBO argues that U.S. shipyards lack the capacity to build them. Per its report, “By 2035, the Navy’s 2027 plan would more than double the tonnage of large surface combatants that shipbuilders would need to produce. Overall, the tonnage of large surface combatants to be constructed would need to increase by 60 percent, while the tonnage of small surface combatants would decrease by about 40 percent. Accommodating such a sizable increase in the production of large surface combatants could be a challenge for the shipbuilding industry.”
Many experts say the plan is already doomed. As one noted, “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water,” adding, “this ship will never sail.”
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