Of course he wants one of the ships named after him….
I wonder if this will get anywhere with Congress , which has to sign off with the bill…
And?
The fact that it WILL take YEARS to design and build , with expected cost overruns, could very well doom the idea….
President Donald Trump on Monday said he will oversee the development of a new class of Navy battleship — named after himself.
The move was cast in part as an effort to give the nation’s stagnant shipbuilding industry a shot in the arm, but also will upend the Navy’s ship-naming norms and thrust presidential politics firmly into the program from its genesis. The announcement follows a flurry of recent actions by Trump to rebrand existing institutions to include his name, including the U.S. Institute of Peace and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Trump, speaking alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, said the new warships will have “guns and missiles at the highest level,” along with hypersonic weapons, electric rail guns and lasers. The first battleship, to be called the USS Defiant, will be part of a broader effort to build a modern “Golden Fleet” of warships, Trump said, indicating that he will play a leading role in the program….
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A logo unveiled for the new ship class depicts Trump in the moments after a July 2024 assassination attempt, fist held high.
The Trump-class naming, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, would defy the Navy’s long-standing — if unevenly applied — traditions of naming aircraft carriers after presidents and battleships after states. Almost all of the service’s current carriers are named after former commanders in chief, including the USS Gerald R. Ford, the lead ship in a class of aircraft carrier that is expected to include other ships named after President John F. Kennedy, President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush. Typically, a class of warship shares its name with the first vessel in that class.
The Navy relied heavily on battleships during World War II but they were eventually deemed obsolete and decommissioned…
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Mark Cancian, a senior adviser in the defense and security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. He questioned whether the vessel itself ever would be built, noting that its significant size will saddle the battleship with similar limitations and vulnerabilities as the nation’s other large warships. The Navy for decades has emphasized a smaller and distributed fleet as a way to counter evolving technologies such as drone warfare.
“There’s going to be a lot of ink spilled over this ship — but this ship is never going to sail,” Cancian predicted. “It’s going to take four, five, six years to develop a ship this large that is so unlike current designs.”….
Note….
The US navy got rid the old ones because they did NOT make sense Today….
It IS typical fro Trump to try to do something thaty actually makes no damn sense…
Defense Sec Hegseth HAS to be smiling….
More “War’ toys to play with?
(The image don’t even look like a ‘Battle Ship)
Update….
A fact sheet says the class will also include several weapons that don’t yet exist: a 32-megajoule railgun, two 300kW tactical lasers, and a dozen large tubes for the under-development Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles. The Associated Pressnotes that “the Navy has struggled to field some of the technologies Trump says will be aboard the new ship. The Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars and more than 15 years trying to field a railgun aboard a ship before finally abandoning the effort in 2021.”…
Defense One…
image…The War Zone
Trump’s New Battleship Will Never Sail
Mark Cancian: “On December 22, President Trump announced a new class of ‘battleships’ that will be 100 times more powerful than previous battleships and larger than any other surface combatant on the oceans. The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion.”
“However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail. It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”