(CNN) — The Trump administration’s plan for the US Navy to build its largest battleships since World War II comes with a whopping price tag of $275 billion, and US shipyards may not have the capacity to build them, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office says.
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.
In releasing its 2027 shipbuilding plan in May, the Navy said it planned to acquire 15 of the 35,000-ton displacement battleships between 2028 and 2056.
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.
In comparison to other shipbuilding programs, the battleships would rank near the top in cost.
For instance, the USS Gerald R Ford, the most modern of the US Navy’s aircraft carriers, which was commissioned in 2017, cost $13.3 billion. Newer versions of the Ford class are expected to cost around $22 billion, the CBO report says. Upcoming Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines come with a price tag of $10 billion apiece.
Shipyard capacity troubles
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.
It’s also a shipbuilding industry that’s been prone to delays and cost overruns.
In 2025, then-Navy Secretary John Phelan told Congress the best Navy shipbuilding program was six months behind schedule and 57% over budget.
“All of our programs are a mess,” he testified.
The CBO report says the two key builders of surface combatants, Bath Iron Works, in Maine, or Ingalls Shipbuilding, in Mississippi, are both “facing challenges in building destroyers on schedule.”
Deliveries of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are delayed an average of five years, it says.
But while those two shipyards have been the only builders of US surface combatants for four decades, they don’t have the capacity to build nuclear-powered ships, the CBO report says.
Navy officials said assembly would fall to Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, where aircraft carriers and some submarines are made. But the CBO report raises questions about how building battleships at Newport News would affect those other programs that are already running into delays.
The report finally notes the how a building a new class of ships from scratch taxes the entire shipbuilding industry, noting the “steep learning curve” involved.
“Even shipyards that already build Navy ships would face challenges in designing and building the first ship of a new class. Lead ships in Navy shipbuilding almost always take longer to build and cost more than initially estimated,” it concluded.
Even if all the building challenges can be overcome, many analysts question whether money spent on battleships would be well-spent at a time when low-cost drones are increasingly effective in naval warfare.
“Does it make sense to put so much expensive weaponry and so many sailors on a single, potentially vulnerable platform?” retired Adm. James Stavridis wrote in a January op-ed for Bloomberg.
“Given today’s drone swarms, stealthy submarines, hypersonic missiles, advanced torpedoes and offensive cyberweapons, putting lots of eggs in a handful of big baskets doesn’t make much sense,” Stavridis wrote.
The-CNN-Wire
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