War New ‘Trump-Class’ Navy Warships Named After President: What to Know

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President Donald Trump announced plans Monday for a new class of large Navy warships bearing his name.

The so-called “Trump-class” ships would be described as battleships, though officials say they would be next-generation surface combatants built on technology derived from the Navy’s existing Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, now a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Associated Press the announcement is expected to include a new, large surface combatant class of ship and up to 50 support vessels.

The White House is framing the move as a centerpiece of Trump's vision for a revamped “Golden Fleet."
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The president was joined Monday at Mar-a-Lago by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan for what the White House called a “major announcement.”

The announcement follows renewed White House pressure to expand U.S. shipbuilding after the Navy recently scrapped plans for a smaller warship amid cost overruns and delays.

The plan is being unveiled at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort as he vacations in Florida and as U.S. forces conduct operations in the Caribbean that the administration says are aimed at disrupting drug trafficking and increasing pressure on Venezuela’s government. Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery said he supports expanding the fleet with additional support ships but questioned the need for a new battleship-like vessel.

Historically, the term battleship has referred to large, heavily armored ships armed with massive guns, a class that peaked in prominence during World War II. The role of such ships declined rapidly after the war as aircraft carriers and long-range missiles became dominant, and the Navy decommissioned its last Iowa-class battleships in the 1990s after briefly modernizing them in the 1980s.

Trump has long expressed strong views about the Navy’s fleet, at times favoring older technologies. During his first term, he unsuccessfully pushed to return to steam-powered catapults on aircraft carriers and has repeatedly criticized the appearance of Navy ships, including complaints about rust.

Navy Secretary John Phelan has told senators that Trump has frequently texted him late at night about ship maintenance and design, and Trump has previously said he personally intervened to alter the design of a now-canceled frigate, calling the original version “a terrible-looking ship.”


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This is a breaking news story. Updates to follow.

This article includes reporting by the Associated Press.
 
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Nothing better than a slow-moving, large target in the age of autonomous drones. ZOG never learns anything ever.
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Cheese Squeeze said:
Another area where this seems to be biting them in the ass the hardest is patriot missile systems and interceptors but that's another topic.
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Same with the javelins and artillery shells. It's a capacity issue. I'll touch on that down below.
Cheese Squeeze said:
Then you've got the whole MIC/Govt revolving door where people leave government positions to work for the MIC and vice versa. This overlap between the contractors and the government isn't improving things somehow.
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Yeah this is a very real and clear issue. There's pros and cons, obviously the cons are the kickbacks and blatant corruption and favoritism (looking at you, Cheney), but industry specialists and government officials have a lot of overlapping knowledge. Both groups are in the know about ongoing programs, capabilities, technology, needs, and classified information like technology or emerging threats.

(This part is outside of my wheelhouse, I'm not an ethicist or philosopher or anything) I'm hesitant to say the problem is totally the closeness of the two, and gut says that it's the same problem we're seeing with American society as a whole right now, which, in my opinion, is the same thing that killed the Roman Republic, which is the consolidation of wealth and power. Wealth tends to only flow up, never down. Excess wealth can be created due to specific economic circumstances, and in a "rising tides lift all boats" sense this can benefit the average people, but generally, things stay the same for the everyman, maybe a little worse or better over time, while wealth flows up. Powerful and wealthy families, politicians, corporate executives, industry leaders, tend to intermarry. There is no benefit to do anything else but marry to an equally powerful family, as marrying into an average family simply dilutes your wealth, and therefore influence and power. Over time these families and their influence networks consolidate. For instance, in early Rome, there were 100 patrician families, with a total population of Rome somewhere in the tens of thousands, estimates range from 35,000-50,000. By the time of Augustus, there were 14 active patrician families for a population of over 1 million. What was a benefit in the early days, the state being able to quickly and efficiently coordinate official efforts with the economic movers and shakers, turned into a liability, as this evolved into the corrupt latifundia system where virtually all arable land was owned by these families and worked by slaves or impoverished sharecroppers.



I will give a parallel to help emphasize my point. Cincinnatus, most well known as the man who was found plowing his field when he was notified that he had been elected dictator and was to be granted total control over the state. He reluctantly accepted, and within days raised an army, defeated the threat, only to return to his field and surrender his power immediately. He was at the top of Roman society. He was a prominent member of a prominent family, he was elected dictator twice, and twice immediately relinquished power to go back to farming his land. He was a citizen-soldier. Glenn L. Martin, born to a humble wheat farmer, took an early interest in aviation when he picked up making kites as a hobby. As a young boy, he sold box kites for a quarter each. In 1909 he made his first functional plane from bamboo and scrap silk. He would work on it at night, after working the field with his father, his mother would hold the lantern for him. He would create the Martin Company in 1912, which, after several mergers, would go on to become one half of today's Lockheed-Martin.

I'm not sure what the fix is, as I said, I'm not a philosopher or ethicist, but I see the fat, lazy non productive elite class of today the same way I imagine the Romans saw the fat, lazy, non productive patricians that operated their latifundia.
Cheese Squeeze said:
As for govt vs contractors I think the contractors share a good part of the responsibility for the long term instability simply because they're the ones trying to make everything as profitable as possible.
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Yes and no. Like I said, greed is definitely an issue, but we're looking at extremely high risk high reward in this environment. There is no room to go all in on what could be a revolutionary new product when, because the current administration or party that controls Congress doesn't like you, you're fucked, or because everyone agrees that your stuff is good, but because the parties hate each other, you're still fucked, because they refuse to pass a budget which procures your Wonderbeam 9000 because the Democrats want to send more abortions to Somalia and the Republicans want to make eating ass illegal or some shit. This one I do actually have a fix for, but it is unlikely to be taken seriously because it involves paying people full time wages for part time work.

Are you aware that the EU has a significantly larger capacity for artillery shell production than the US? How they manage this is by paying defense contractors to keep factories functional in case a surge is needed. Essentially, how it would work here, is the US would tell companies "we want you to be able to produce X number of Y a month, and we will pay you to maintain enough slack capacity and employees to meet that number." This means that you may have 5,000 dudes working at bomb, missile, artillery, and tank factories when you really only need 1,000. For the workers, that means that in an 8 hour or 10 hour shift, they may only work like, 3 hours, it also means that you may have five or six ammunition plants that sitting there with a skeleton crew that do nothing but make sure the stuff works if they need it, but it also means, with little or zero warning, you can ramp up production to several times peacetime production, and you have a large pool of skilled workers, so it is less crippling when you need to pull some off the line to rapidly train new people if you need to further expand production. People don't like this answer because, in their eyes, it is paying people to do nothing, however I prefer to see it as insurance, or cops and firefighters. Most cops and firefighters deal with bullshit nuisance calls most nights, or sit on their ass and drink coffee at a Denny's, but sometimes they have to respond to a tranny shooting children at a Christian school.

Like I said earlier, a revitalization effort should also include a bipartisan, long term deal to incentivize these companies to innovate, compete, and expand their capacity and talent pool. I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting a blank check, along with the money there should come oversight, but realistically I just don't see how we fix a lot of these issues with a plan that doesn't involve a shit ton of tax dollars and public-private partnerships and investment.

I hate Clinton so much it's fucking unreal, bro.
Blewberry Nausea said:
Question: are the shipyards even in a state to build these ships in any capacity?
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Absolutely not. See my earlier post on our shipyards and how they are currently tooled.
Cheese Squeeze said:
Should have included this in the original reply but w/e. How did the russians keep their slack capacity intact from the cold war up till now do you think?
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Some of their capacity has evaporated, but the answer to the question "how have they kept the slack capacity they do have," the answer is "sell sell sell." Despite having the GDP roughly the size of California, they are the second largest arms exporter on the planet. They will sell their shit to anyone, anywhere, no questions asked, as long as you have the cash. I cannot explain to you how absurd it is that Russia, who is economically irrelevant in virtually every sector outside of arms manufacturing, manages to sell so much fucking shit. It doesn't matter if the Russian army is only ever going to field 1,000 T-90Ms or whatever in peacetime if you make a stripped down export monkey model piece of shit which uses the same chassis and sell it to anyone who pinky promises to not send one to the US.

Production of artillery, small arms, and ground vehicles has remained strong because of this, but their aerospace sector has suffered terribly, because most smaller countries can manage to keep a monkey model tank mostly running, but keeping an Su-27 airworthy is much harder, and for a while Russia couldn't offer the support to these countries required to keep the airframes functional.
 
What a fucking waste of money. The age of Battleships died in WW2 when we found out that we can have mobile airfields on the sea.
 
A Cardboard Box said:
Both groups are in the know about ongoing programs, capabilities, technology, needs, and classified information like technology or emerging threats.
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I have a question. If (like I do) you accept that the continuity of agenda exists, that is, that the deep state exists and whoever sits in the oval office has zero control over long term US military goals eg: russia must be defeated, china must be defeated, iran must be defeated, support israel no matter what. And that the us govt and MIC share so many people, why does the long term unwavering adherence to the military strategy not translate to a long term plan for military hardware?
 
Farm Hand said:
Man, I really wish there were more places where I could see some serious, steelman discussion of this battleship plan and the need to grow/evolve the US Navy (which I believe everyone knows to be a necessity). I don't think there's any place on reddit that isn't a dismissive collection of "Orange Man Bad", "battleships are obsolete", and "lol @ the US making a new military vehicle ever again".
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I'm more than willing to have a serious conversation about making a modern large surface combatant, I'm just telling you that this ain't it, chief. I'm open to a large surface combatant in the Navy, but we need to be very clear about what role it is intended to fill, what capabilities it will bring that we don't have already, and if covering those capability gaps is worth an entire new, very, very expensive class of ship.

When you make a ship class, you are signing up for hundreds of billions of dollars over several decades in development, tooling, production, and sustainment. Even shitbox failed abortions like the LCS or Zumwalt require taxpayers to shell out absurd amounts of money over an extended period of time simply because they exist.

Anyway, I would personally love to have a serious conversation about the merits of a modern large surface combatant. What role and capabilities do you think this brings which we do not have, and if not this ship specifically, than what other large surface combatant would you like to see and why? I already have an answer/proposal for this question myself, but I would like to hear from you first about the Trump/Defiance Class.
 
Sexual Chocolate said:
You will never be a real battleship. You have no 16" guns, you have no turrets, you have no Mk 1 electromechanical analog fire control computers. You are a guided missile cruiser twisted by CGI and Marco Rubio into a crude mockery of nature’s perfection.
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Perfectly servicable cannon power. Get in the 16 inch guns!
Cheese Squeeze said:
Something I find funny is that the admiral kuznetzov looks like an aircraft carrier but it's packing 12 gigantic 7-ton anti-carrier missiles that launch vertically out of concealed hatches in the flight deck. Now That's crazy.
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The Sharty's command carrier, Of course it has hidden Soviet Tesla rockets.


I don't... mind the idea of a missile carrier ship, damn its not even a new idea.

But all the lasers and railguns on it feel like it will be a bigger headache and cost than something more mundane that works properly all the time.

It is also an aviation battleship with a helicopter. I guess for sub patrol, but they could just put a few F-35s on it. Aviation battleships never quite worked out yet, I would rather give it a few escorts with helicopters and add more missiles or another gun turret there. I feel like it should have more flak defense for drones too, maybe some AA missile racks?

I just have the feeling that Trump got bamboozled by "It got lasers and railguns like Trek Wars!" and he boomered into it.
 
A Cardboard Box said:
I'm more than willing to have a serious conversation about making a modern large surface combatant, I'm just telling you that this ain't it, chief. I'm open to a large surface combatant in the Navy, but we need to be very clear about what role it is intended to fill, what capabilities it will bring that we don't have already, and if covering those capability gaps is worth an entire new, very, very expensive class of ship.

When you make a ship class, you are signing up for hundreds of billions of dollars over several decades in development, tooling, production, and sustainment. Even shitbox failed abortions like the LCS or Zumwalt require taxpayers to shell out absurd amounts of money over an extended period of time simply because they exist.

Anyway, I would personally love to have a serious conversation about the merits of a modern large surface combatant. What role and capabilities do you think this brings which we do not have, and if not this ship specifically, than what other large surface combatant would you like to see and why? I already have an answer/proposal for this question myself, but I would like to hear from you first about the Trump/Defiance Class.
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You are just mad it's named the Trump class, otherwise you'd like it if Biden had done it, you commie dicksucker
 
Hitman One said:
Why did ameriniggers get run out of Afghanistan by inbred Taliban goatfuckers?
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Actual war was decided in days. Occupation failed because the bean counters wanted to create a liberal Afghanistan, was unwilling to poison the wells and burn the farms in rebellious territory, and eventually left once it became clear the entire thing was a grift to reward political allies.

America could have spent a week in 2001 just exterminating every taliban stronghold, split the country in half, put a Tajik warlord in charge of the north, give him the guns and halftracks to be a pain in the ass of any Pashtun asshole that tries to reform Afghanistan, then fuck off
 
mindlessobserver said:
Which is why I am going to be cautiously hype on the USS Defiant, provided of course the Navy actually builds the platform for what it needs to do. Its not an offensive weapon. Its the ship of the line. The wall of steel between the carrier and the threats that are coming for it.

I am not buying the hype about drone swarms and hypersonic ballistic missiles being able to take out carriers right now, but that is where warfare tech is going. The Carrier by its nature cannot have the necessary defense equipment to stand off drone swarms, missiles coming in from orbit or mass rocket barrages. It needs to focus on launching air craft. Destroyers and cruisers are likewise not suited for point defense at close range because of the need for them being dual use.

A Battleship on the other hand, CAN defend the carrier from these threats. Provided it is designed for the role. Trump may be seeking a vanity project here, but its the kind of vanity project that can produce the outside context warship that the US Navy absolutely does need.
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WelperHelper posted up the proposed armament and each broadside has a RAM launcher, a pair of ODIN soft-kill laser dazzlers and a pair of 30mm CIWS, and a 5"/62 capable of throwing a 5" shell into the air every 3 seconds, and that's on top of what the VLS cells can have which is... everything from SAM's to cruise missiles to even decoys.
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There's also the fact that bigger ships are by their sheer size alone harder to kill than smaller ones, and the USA has no problem fixing up even the worst damage so long as a ship can make it back to port, even on a modern vessel. USS Cole had a massive hole blown into her right at the waterline that took three days for the damcon teams to fully contain, arrived at the yards in December of 2000, and was back at sea less than a week after the 9/11 attacks.
Leylon Sneed said:
I'm also pretty sure the only functional lasers are chemical lasers, which do draw a lot of power, but don't really have a great renge depending on atmospheric conditions, and still have the chemical part, so are not just a weapon with a potentially bottomless magazine.
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The chemical lasers have gone the way of the dodo, solid-state lasers doing everything they did and more at a fraction of the overall size and weight and with no dangerous fluorine and chlorine compounds present.
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A Cardboard Box said:
Not the 20kw lasers that are apparently cutting Su-35s in half like in the render Trump showed, but we do have them.
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HELIOS can go up to 120Kw if you're willing to shut down half the ship's electronics just to power it.
Lieutenant Rasczak said:
It's about 15,000 tons larger than what the Japanese plan to build with their new 20,000 ton Cruiser, and it's about the same tonnage of a North Carolina Class. China similarly is planning on building a 25,000 ton surface combatant from what I've heard. My one pet peeve is that there's two single 5" turrets instead of a single dual turret. I get why, you don't have to put R&D into developing a dual 5" turret but you're still going to get problems with having to maintain two single turrets as opposed to a single double turret.
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Doesn't look like they have the centerline space for it, not with VLS tubes there. And there are few things more privileged on a warship than centerline space.
 
Hitman One said:
Why did ameriniggers get run out of Afghanistan by inbred Taliban goatfuckers?
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By not having any sort of achievable political goal which would've made continuing occupation of the graveyard of the empires cost effective or desirable idea?

It wasn't problem of firepower or armor.
 
Hitman One said:
Why did ameriniggers get run out of Afghanistan by inbred Taliban goatfuckers?
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A lack of a clear reason for being there and inability to shill to the niggercattle why we were still there (which we should have left ages ago but c'est la vie)

The American .mil is an incredible killing machine against an actual military. It's just really fucking bad at 'nation building' and 'policing actions' because that's not it's job.
 
Snekposter said:
VLS cells can have which is... everything from SAM's to cruise missiles to even decoys.
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Don't forget the 12 hypersonic VLS cells, which will be nuclear armed. This is going to be a nuclear armed surface combatant. If anything, that is why the battleship designation is being pulled out. Along with the vast conventional weaponry, it can just nuke the enemy.
 
Farm Hand said:
Man, I really wish there were more places where I could see some serious, steelman discussion of this battleship plan and the need to grow/evolve the US Navy (which I believe everyone knows to be a necessity). I don't think there's any place on reddit that isn't a dismissive collection of "Orange Man Bad", "battleships are obsolete", and "lol @ the US making a new military vehicle ever again".
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To be fair, this is almost certainly at least 70% vanity project by Trump. But the other 30% can be interesting. You can just "do more" with a battleship then with a smaller chassis. The rub is "what do we need more of?"
 
mindlessobserver said:
To be fair, this is almost certainly at least 70% vanity project by Trump. But the other 30% can be interesting. You can just "do more" with a battleship then with a smaller chassis. The rub is "what do we need more of?"
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Drone carrier sounds cool
Or give it legs
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mindlessobserver said:
The rub is "what do we need more of?"
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C3i and missile defense. Those new giant-ass panel radars on the Burkes are really pushing the limit in terms of what the powerplant can provide and what the hull can fit. Between radars and lasers we need a crapton more electrical output and the Burkes don't have the generator capacity for both.
 
Seeing how drones have fucked tanks over like no tomorrow. Not sure how traditional boats on water will fair against the same shit situation.
Especially when it just takes one or two well placed explosives flown by a drone to blow a hole in a boat and sink it.
 
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