On Monday (December 22, 2025), US President Donald Trump announced plans for a new "Trump-class" battleship, claiming that it would be "the fastest, largest, and far more powerful than any previous battleship, up to 100 times more powerful." He called the ships "among the most lethal surface combatants" and promised they would "help maintain U.S. military supremacy and strike fear into the hearts of America's enemies around the world."
But there was an obvious problem: battleships were decades out of date. The last battleship was built more than 80 years ago, and the U.S. Navy retired its last batch of Iowa-class battleships nearly 30 years ago.
Battleships once symbolized naval power with their giant guns, but have long been replaced by aircraft carriers and modern destroyers equipped with long-range missiles.
While calling the new surface combatant a "battleship" may be a misnomer, defense experts point out that there are still many gaps between Trump's vision and modern naval warfare.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), dismissed the idea, writing in a Dec. 23 commentary: “This discussion is almost unnecessary because this ship will never be launched.”
He believes that the project design takes too long, is too costly, and goes against the Navy's current "distributed fires" strategy.
"A future administration would cancel the program before the first ship is launched," Cancian said.
Bernard Loo, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore (RSIS), described the proposal as "more of a face-saving project than anything else".
He likened it to Japan's World War II-era super battleships Yamato and Musashi - the largest battleships in history - which were sunk by carrier-based aircraft before they could play a significant combat role.
"Historically, when people look at battleships, they think bigger is better... From a very layman's strategic perspective, size does matter," Lew said.
He added that the proposed battleship, which would displace more than 35,000 tons and be more than 840 feet long (just over two football fields), would be a "magnet for bombs."
"Its size and symbolism make it a more tempting target, especially for potential adversaries," Lu said.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, believes Trump may have been drawn to the symbolism of the battleship, which served as the most visible symbol of naval firepower throughout much of the 20th century.