The Golden Fleet: America’s New Plan for Naval Dominance.

On December the 22nd, 2025, US President Donald Trump gifted a rather unconventional Christmas present to his nation.

Flanked by his secretaries of state and defense, or more if you prefer, Trump announced the creation of the Trump class battleship.

Yes, you heard that right, the Trump class battleship.

Over eight full decades since the last time the battleship ruled the seas, America’s commander-in-chief has declared that the idea is back in vogue and that America’s entire new line of battleships is going to bear his name.

Once those battleships come online, they’re going to form the centerpiece of a far larger US military effort, Trump’s so-called and newlyannounced Golden Fleet.

Now, if that all sounds like we’ve teed up a nice holiday joke for our dear Frontco audience, then do you think again, because at least for now, Donald Trump’s Golden Fleet is a matter of US policy.

So, let’s ask the questions that honestly just naturally follow from there.

Why is the United States investing in battle ships? It’s been a while in the 2020s.

What is the Golden Fleet? How is the United States, a nation facing a well-documented ship building crisis, going to accomplish a task like this? And does the Trump class stand any chance at surviving Washington DC after Trump himself leaves office? The Trump class battleship.

When Donald Trump unveiled the Trump class battleship at a press conference at his Mara Lago estate in Florida, it became very very clear very very quickly that the vessels were to serve a dual purpose.

On the one hand, the battleship that Trump proposed was just that, a large fighting vessel meant for surface naval warfare with the expectation that it would be a key asset in America’s future naval fleet.

On the other hand, the Trump class is about projecting power and building, to quote Trump, the flagships of the American naval fleet.

As Trump explained in his broadcast address, quoting again, “America’s battleships have always been unmistakable symbols of national power.

” As Trump’s secretary of defense andor war added, quoting here, “American strength is back on the world stage.

” During the address and virus subsequent press release from the US Navy, “The contours of the Trump class battleship quickly began to take shape.

The class of ships is set to reach a fairly massive size, over three times as large as the Arley Burke class destroyer, the central combat class that defines America’s surface warfare fleet.

The Trump class is said to displace between 30,000 and 40,000 tons of sheer mass in comparison to the Arleyberg classes 9,500 tons or the more limited production Americans and more class at 15,600 tons.

The Trump class of ships will be capable of hitting top speeds of above 30 knots around 35 mph or 55 kmh.

It’ll measure a length of up to 880 ft or 268 m, a beam or width of up to 115 ft or 35 m, and a draft or the subsurface depth of the hull of up to 30 ft or 9 m.

Its crew complement will include anywhere from 650 sailors to 850.

When the ship concept was unveiled at Mara Lago, the announcement placed a heavy emphasis on its onboard weapon systems, including an assortment of highly advanced systems that are not currently in service.

Those included hypersonic missiles known as intermediate range conventional prompt strike weapons, laser directed energy weapons that will probably resemble Loheed Martin’s Helios system and electromagnetic rail guns.

The Trunk class will also leverage nuclear armed cruise missiles known as SLCMN, currently in a prototyping phase, as well as Tomahawk cruise missiles and multiple conventional 5-in naval guns.

The ships are expected to integrate two copies of a surfaceto-air missile system known as the RIM 116 for defense against incoming aerial weapons as well as an impressive 128 missile vertical launch cells plus another 12 cells for those hypersonic missiles in development.

For comparison, the most common Arley Berg variant features a total of 96 cells.

The Trump class will also serve as a command and control hub for crude and uncrrewed platforms and will integrate as yet unnamed artificial intelligence capabilities.

It will feature an onboard flight deck with multiple hangers from which it will be able to launch and recover tilt rotor aircraft like the V22 Osprey and probably a range of smaller helicopters.

The Trump class is expected to ultimately result in the construction of between 20 and 25 hulls, although a first run of production will consist of 10 ships overall, two of which are expected to be built on a rush timeline.

The ships will be built in Philadelphia at the South Korean-owned Hanoir Philly shipyard, acquired by the Hanoir Group in late 2024.

The program is expected to draw on an industrial base of over 1,000 suppliers based in all 50 US states.

The battleships will form the centerpiece of a future naval fleet, integrating both America’s future line of frigots, which we’ll discuss shortly, and fleets of unmanned surface vessels, probably alongside manned and unmanned underwater vessels.

The design of the ships will be led by the US Navy, although America’s commander-in-chief has stated that he will take a personal interest in the design because he is quoting him directly, a very aesthetic person.

The first ship of the line will be named the USS Defiance, although unlike most cases, the entire ship class will not bear the name of the first ship produced, which would in this case make them the Defiant class instead of the Trump class.

Quoting Trump again, America’s president promised that the ships will be quote the fastest, the biggest, and by far a h 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.

US Navy Secretary John Felen added a few superlatives of his own, calling the upcoming USS Defiance the quote largest, deadliest, and most versatile, and best looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans.

Best looking? Who cares? It’s a battleship.

Should be there to up, not look good.

a question of value.

Now, before we go any further, it’s important that we mention two very important things about the Trump class battleship.

First and foremost, that it’s not actually a battleship by America’s own standard.

While ship classifications are ultimately at the discretion of the National Navy that’s doing the classifying, the distinction matters anyway because in reality, what Trump is proposing for the Trump class is not a ship as large as the battleships of old.

The last four battleships commissioned by the US Navy, the World War II era Iowa class, each came with a displacement of over 57,000 tons when fully loaded.

Whereas the range targeted for the Trump class, is far smaller, between 30 and 40,000 tons.

That’s much more in line with the US battle cruiser, like the Alaska class, also of World War II fame, which displaced around 34,000 tons when fully loaded.

If that all sounds like a distinction without a difference, then we don’t blame you.

Much to the chagrin of naval nerds around the world, it doesn’t really matter whether a vessel is classified a battleship, a battle cruiser, or a canoe, as long as it fulfills its intended purpose.

But we mentioned the Trump class vessel’s tonnage because ship tonnage is about more than just classification, especially in modern-day naval warfare.

See, although battleships were abandoned by the navies of the world after the Second World War, the problem with battleships was never that they were impossible to make effective.

Or once aircraft carriers could deliver swarms of dive and torpedo bombers to neutralize battleships, they were made obsolete.

But technically speaking, world navies could have invested the money, physical resources, and time required to build new versions of battleships with so much effective anti-air firepower that they’d render planes ineffective.

Unfortunately for the battleships, that proposition was so obviously costly and timeintensive that no nation even bothered to make a serious attempt and the battleship was lost to history.

But that was less a question of technical feasibility and much more a question of resource investment.

The problem with building really expensive, sophisticated, high tonnage battleships is that they represent a tremendous amount of time and wealth expended by the nation that builds them only for those battleships that then sail headlong into combat zones where adversaries will work really, really hard to put them on the bottom of the ocean.

That’s also a problem for say an aircraft carrier.

But over the last several decades, it’s been easier to justify investing those costs into an aircraft carrier for a few reasons.

They’re typically kept far from any actual naval engagement.

They’re protected by other ships and aircraft that can detect submarines and other incoming threats.

And they’re so valuable as a tool of power projection that the investment is worth the risks.

But even for the aircraft carrier, naval experts have been warning for quite some time that the calculus is changing.

maneuverable ship killing hypersonic weaponry is a growing threat especially from China whereas smaller and easier to sink vessels like say a ship the size of a battle cruiser would also be subject to destruction on cheap surface or submersible naval drones for a comparison case we need only look at the Mosfur a smaller Russian guided missile cruiser that was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet until it was sunk by a pair of Ukrainian anti-hship missiles in 2022 the estimated cost of the Moser at the time of its sinking was roughly equivalent to $750 million at a minimum, while the value of the two missiles that forcibly reclassified it as a submarine combined to $3 million US at most.

In a broader sense, the 2020s are a period when surface naval vessels are under attack and when cramming high-value technology, personnel, and munitions onto a single massive floating platform is becoming a less and less advisable decision both strategically and financially.

So the main problem with introducing a warship like the Trump class, whether it’s a battleship, a battle cruiser, or something else entirely, is that it represents the aggregation of 30 to 40,000 tons worth of sheer value.

That value includes the cost of the materials to build the ship itself to the onboard sensors and other technology to the purportedly advanced weapon systems and more.

Not to mention all of the people required to operate the vessel.

We live in a moment when all available evidence from global naval engagements suggests that nations should be emphasizing lowerc cost smaller platforms optionally manned or unmanned whenever possible while trying to make those platforms as effective as possible on the expectation that many of those platforms will be lost.

Building a ship like the Trump class, as it’s currently described, would mean taking the precise opposite path at a moment when conventional wisdom would suggest that cramming expensive hardware onto massive ships is a fool’s errand.

While Washington hasn’t indicated the expected cost of the ships, external estimates suggest that they could cost up to5 billion US each.

For comparison, Ukraine’s Seaby drone is capable of carrying explosive warhead of up to $850 kg, capable of punching a hole through thick holes, and it costs $240,000.

That’s barely 121,000th of the estimated cost of the Trump class.

The holes of these battle cruisers would likely be even thicker than what current babyc drones could deal with.

But considering the pacing and versatility of naval drone innovation, it should be no surprise that an adversary nation would respond by creating higher payload USVs.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that these warships are doomed to failure.

Much like the death of the traditional battleship during World War II, there are ways to ensure that a newer large battle cruiser could be survivable.

The question then is whether making a battle cruiser survivable is worth the cost.

In fact, a close look at the Trump class would suggest that although it’s a real gamble, it might be a calculated risk.

That is to say, its designers may understand the losing value proposition of large ships in modern naval combat.

But they also might believe that the balance is soon going to shift back in the opposite direction.

That’s partially indicated by the range of new weapon systems that the Pentagon says they’d like to include, from directed energy laser weapons to rail guns to hypersonic missiles and more.

So all that financial investment in the Trump class would thus be worthwhile because unlike these Russian warships and other vessels subject to destruction by unmanned systems, the Trump class would be able to keep itself safe from those threats.

Unfortunately, while that assessment isn’t guaranteed to be wrong, at least not yet, it comes with a few glaring problems.

For one thing, each of those weapon systems is currently unproven.

The US Navy has just started integrating its hypersonic missile launch cells onto the first of its Zumbol class destroyers.

The Helios directed energy system is only integrated onto a single Arley Burke class destroyer for testing purposes and falls far short of the 600 kW output of the systems the US wants for the Trump class.

Finally, the US Navy paused its experimentation into rail gun technology back in 2021.

Although that decision was due to integration issues and the technology did seem to work in a vacuum.

Relying on unproven technology comes with a whole range of problems.

From the potential that some or all of the tech will be delayed to the risk that it won’t work as promised to the risk that it will work, but it’ll be really slow to produce, forcing new battle cruisers to either collect dust in port or be forward deployed with an incomplete set of capabilities.

Not only that, but the list of countermeasures that the US has described so far doesn’t seem to account for kamicazi star surface or undersea threats.

To be clear, those aren’t an abstract issue.

They’ve been used at scale, not only by Ukraine, but by non-state actors like Yemen’s Houthy rebels.

Failing to plan for them would be a major misstep by the United States.

Next up, we’re going to place the Trump class into context with the rest of America’s future combat fleet.

But before we do that, we’d like to ask you a question.

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Solution, problem or neither.

So, as we examine the larger feasibility of the Trump class battleship, we’ve also got to talk about the larger concept of Trump’s Golden Fleet, the new generation collection of naval combat vessels that will join it in combat.

Among other designs, the new Golden Fleet is expected to include unmanned surface and undersea vessels of varying kinds, a new line of aircraft carriers that Trump alluded to in his address, but didn’t describe further, and a next generation submarine, either the Colombia class that’s currently under construction, or possibly a replacement.

But the other most important announcement Trump’s Navy has made about its future fleet besides the Trump class is a new frigate known as the FFX which is set to replace the canceled constellation class frigot program after the constellation was bet with severe problems and delays.

The new FFX is going to be based on an existing ship in service with the US Coast Guard, a frigized cutter vessel known as the Legend class.

The Legend is a proven design well-liked by the Coast Guard.

And while it’s a good deal smaller than the planned constellation class, it’s ready to be built relatively quickly.

It’s going to be redesigned into a frigate with only limited modification from the Legend class design in an attempt to avoid the major snowballing design changes the Navy had kept ordering for the constellation class.

But that decision is expected to leave the new FFX quite underpowered.

As confirmed by military outlet The War Zone, the frigots are not going to integrate a vertical launch system or VLS array to launch missiles in what the outlet described as, quoting here, a glaring emission that can only raise questions about the operational utility and flexibility of the ships.

End quote.

Instead, the frig will serve as mother ships for USVs with the option to carry modular containerized missile launchers, which would probably bring substantially reduced missile launch capability.

While the FFX is set to be modified in future iterations, and quoting an anonymous Navy official speaking to the war zone here, the goal is to get holes in the water ASAP.

The FFX still represents a shift into a new untested approach to naval war fighting for the United States, and the Trump class battleship seems on course to make those problems worse.

The FFX without a launch array fails to learn the central lesson of prior underperforming US Navy frigate designs while the Trump class arguably fails to learn the much larger lessons of naval warfare.

Don’t just take it from us either.

Former Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery currently senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies called the Trump class quote exactly what we don’t need.

He also accused the Navy of being focused on quote the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool looking ship.

Writing for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, naval and US defense expert Mark Canian argued, quote, “This ship will never sail.

” And quoting again, “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.

” Now, there are some experts in favor of the new design.

Brian Clark of the Hudson Institute explains the Wall Street Journal that more powerful ships are essential to defend US carriers and that ships with the appropriate power would be about two or three times the size of the Arleyberg class.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, that’s a legitimate argument, but it’s also predicated on the idea that all of this advanced technology will be ready in time and will work when it’s put into action.

Internationally, even the nations that are moving toward bigger warship designs like Germany’s F-127 and South Korea’s Sajong, the Great class, are expected to be just onethird the tonnage of the Trump class.

And even Clark emphasized that from a financial perspective, quote, “There isn’t enough money downstream to pay for all of the ships, especially not when trying to finance the sixth generation FAXX war plane, which American Navy leaders have successfully lobbyed back from the brink of cancellation.

In a broader sense, this entire plan for a new golden fleet seems to ignore the way that ship building in the US actually works.

A slow, bloated process where ship building capabilities are woefully lacking, military planners constantly add design revisions, costs and delays balloon out of control, and once promising but ultimately doomed ship designs have become the norm.

Trump’s timeline for the first ships of the line is extremely ambitious, set to be commissioned in about 2 and 1/2 years.

And while that might be a vote of confidence in America’s ability to overcome those problems, we would be lying if we said American ship building deserve that vote of confidence.

In fact, naval officials speaking privately to the war zone confirmed that construction on the first two Trumpclass ships won’t begin till the early 2030s at least.

The companies that have been tapped for this initiative express that they’re ready to take on the challenge.

But frankly, these are US defense corporations trying to get contracts and have real incentives to overpromise, even if they’re privately skeptical.

Meanwhile, US Navy officials have admitted that a primary motivation for the rush on these programs is the need to just put holes in the water in order to keep up with China.

But holes in the water only matter if the warships built around those holes are able to perform when the time comes.

winning the on-paper battle to produce a greater number of ships doesn’t matter if those ships aren’t equipped to win a real battle.

For our part here at Warfronts, we’d be remiss not to emphasize the broader reality.

America’s naval procurement strategy has been busted for decades, and the frustrations represented by the Trump class and the FFX are entirely warranted.

But if the United States wants to remain competitive on the global seas, its answer cannot be to simply build cool and hope for the best.

What’s the alternative? Well, that’s for America’s brightest naval minds to figure out.

But you don’t have to propose an alternative to see that America would accept major risks by putting its faith in this version of Trump’s golden fleet.

Thank you for watching.