I think that President Trump’s plan to build a “new class of American-designed battleships that will be the most lethal surface combatants ever constructed,” which was announced on December 22, is a BIG mistake.
That is because Trump is fighting the last three U.S. wars of the 20th century: World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. That is when the Navy, especially our aircraft carriers and battleships, performed a pivotal role in defeating or fighting the enemy.
Unfortunately, that is no longer true in 2026 because of the great changes that have occurred in military technology since the demise of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991: low-cost drones, cyberattacks, satellite warfare, lasers, stealth aircraft, hypersonic missiles, GPS, AI, Starlink, and hybrid warfare.
Communist China is our highly adaptable adversary. What U.S. naval tactics and strategies worked in the past wars of the 20th century are not going to necessarily work with Taiwan. Trump’s desire to create a new battleship is the 21st-century equivalent of the failed French Maginot Line in fighting Nazi Germany on May 10, 1940, during the six-week Blitzkrieg.
Our egotistical president, who received four college deferments and another medical deferment for “bone spurs in both heels” during the Vietnam War in 1968, has proposed building “new battleships for the first time in more than 80 years — and is naming them after himself.” Our corpulent commander-in-chief under the Constitution ultimately controls the Navy, and will be initially in charge of constructing the “Trump-class” of battleships until January 20, 2029, but he has zero naval experience.
That is not good.
So, I wonder who is advising him? I strongly suspect two people: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan. Both men, to my knowledge, have limited or no experience in 21st-century naval warfare, especially ex-Army Major and former Fox and Friends Weekend co-host Hegseth (2017-2024).
That is not good.
Trump’s new battleships will obviously “represent an upgrade to the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers — with the current models costing more than $2 billion apiece to build.” That is relatively inexpensive compared to what Trump is proposing, which will cost $10 to $15 billion per warship because they will be three times as big and armed as Arleigh Burke destroyers.
Predictably, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) believes that “[the president’s] ship will never sail.” The CSIS estimates that the inevitable cost overruns will conservatively increase the Trump-class battleships to a minimum of $9 billion per warship.
That is not good.
That is a lot of cash for one battleship, considering that the U.S. national debt is now an astonishing $38.5 trillion and rapidly increasing. According to the House Budget Committee in May 2024, interest on the national debt under Biden unbelievably surpassed spending on national defense, which was unprecedented in U.S. history.
That is not good.
Our deficit spending is also not sustainable unless the Trump tariffs can quickly reduce the national debt, which I truly hope is a success.
According to CBS News, the “U.S. spent $1.1 trillion in interest on its debt in 2024 — almost disgracefully double [my emphasis] the amount it was paying” in 2019. The Trump administration is potentially living in an economic fool’s paradise if it continues to recklessly add to the national debt.
That is not good.
The Trump-class battleships will be “armed with nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles — adding to the nation’s nuclear triad.” Unfortunately, the president’s new battleships remind me of when Adolf Hitler unwisely decided to build two sister battleships, the Bismarck and Tirpitz, in 1936 instead of much more needed U-boats, and a better-encrypted Enigma Machine to fight Britain’s Royal Navy. This also included Hitler’s failure to build more long-range bombers before the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia.
Hitler, from a naval and aerial perspective, was fighting the last war and not the upcoming World War II, which he beganon September 1, 1939.
The first ship in the Trump-class will be the USS Defiant, and it will become the largest surface ship in the world, with a weight of 30,000 to 40,000 tons compared to the 10,000 tons of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, because of its enhanced firepower. However, the USS Defiant would not necessarily be an effective deterrent to the People’s Liberation Army Navy if China ever invaded Taiwan in the 2030s or sooner.
Unfortunately, our next global war might be the Battle of Taiwan, which could easily escalate to World War III. In that possible conflict, all surface combatant ships could potentially be sitting ducks because of drone swarms and hypersonic cruise missiles, which have been occurring in Ukraine constantly since 2022.
I can still remember the deadly damage caused by a subsonic, radar-evading, wave-hovering French Exocet missile when Argentina sank the HMS Sheffield during the Falklands War on May 4, 1982. The British destroyer was completely helpless in detecting the missile until the last minute, and then it was too late. That was forty-four years ago.
I can also easily remember on June 1, 2025, when Ukraine launched a surprise attack by launching 117 inexpensive drones from “commercial cargo trucks” within Russia, and destroyed 10% of Russia’s strategic nuclear bombers. That was only seven months ago.
The destruction of the HMS Sheffield and 10% of Russia’s nuclear bomber fleet were devastating, and I cannot begin to imagine what modern warfare might do to a U.S. surface combatant ship. According to Wired magazine, “The U.S. Must Stop Underestimating Drone Warfare” with a subtitle that emphatically stated, “The future of conflict is cheap, rapidly manufactured, and tough to defend against.”
The U.S. does not seem to get the message. In plain words, million-dollar drones can easily sink multi-billion-dollar aircraft carriers or battleships.
Chinese drone swarms in attacking Taiwan, especially blockading their airports and ports, would especially be lethal against any of our supply ships or any three of our eleven nuclear-powered carrier strike groups as described in the leaked Pentagon “Overmatched Brief.”
That is because our surface support warships, such as frigates, cruisers, and destroyers, would not be able to stop all enemy hypersonic missiles, which travel at over five times the speed of sound. Massive, inexpensive aerial and underwater kamikaze drone attacks, which could potentially overwhelm the defenses of any Trump-class battleship, would also be highly lethal to all our surface warships in the entire Pacific west of Pearl Harbor, which is approximately 5,000 miles from Taiwan.
To be continued
Robert L. Maronic
