The Trump administration’s plan for the US Navy to build its largest battleships since World War II comes with a $275 billion price tag, and US shipyards may not have the capacity to build them, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office says.
Cost and Capacity Concerns
Each of the 15 nuclear-powered surface combatants will cost more than $18 billion, putting them in the range of the Navy’s Ford-class supercarriers, to date the most expensive naval vessels ever built. The huge cost of the battleships, dubbed the “Trump-class,” is driving the Navy’s total procurement budget for surface combatants, which also include destroyers and frigates, to increase by more than two-thirds – from $11 billion in 2025 to $18 billion in 2027, the CBO report says.
The administration announced the battleships last December, with the president saying they would be fitted with “guns and missiles at the highest level,” hypersonic weapons, electric rail guns, cruise missiles, and the “most sophisticated lasers in the world.” Subsequently, the Navy has said the battleships would carry nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, making them the most powerful vessels in the US arsenal after its ballistic-missile submarines.
Challenges in Shipbuilding
The CBO said the first of those ships would cost $23.4 billion, with subsequent ones at $18 billion. That’s a substantial increase in cost per ship, which was $15.1 billion for the first and $10.2 billion for the second and third versions, according to the CBO report. But the report notes the original estimate was for a conventionally powered ship, not the nuclear-powered version.
Money isn’t the only variable in the battleship plan. America’s shipyards might not be able to handle the work, the CBO report says. The new battleships would be more than three-and-a-half times the size of the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, which dominate US surface combatant construction now.
“By 2035, the Navy’s … plan would more than double the tonnage of large surface combatants that shipbuilders would need to produce… Accommodating such a sizable increase in the production of large surface combatants could be a challenge for the shipbuilding industry,” the CBO says.
Original reporting: KEYT (Ventura/Santa Barbara) — read the source article.
