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US’ ‘100x More Powerful’ Battleship Dreams Vs. Hard Reality

Sputnik – December 23, 2025

The Trump administration has touted grand plans for a new class of surface warships that would carry nuclear-armed cruise missiles — along with an entirely new generation of aircraft carriers. The plan calls for at least 25 battleships, each larger than existing destroyers, bristling with hypersonic missiles, lasers, and electromagnetic rail guns.

President Donald Trump has vowed that the new battleships would be “the fastest, biggest, and 100 times more powerful” than any ever built, and would mark the return of a platform the US Navy stopped building in 1944.

However, that happened for reasons that haven’t changed much since: Cost, complexity, and usefulness in modern warfare.

  • There is currently no funding in the Pentagon’s budget for any of this
  • There are no finalized engineering plans, according to media-cited insiders
  • Designing and building a brand-new class of heavily armed warship is a decade-long affair
  • Proposed timeline of roughly two and a half years would be ambitious for a modest refit, let alone a nuclear-capable battleship
  • US shipyards are already behind schedule on every Navy ship currently under construction, many by more than a year
  • Operating a large fleet of complex, one-off ship classes would impose decades of costs for training, spare parts, and logistics
  • Chronic labor shortages, aging infrastructure, and supply-chain bottlenecks have been standard features of US naval shipbuilding for years
  • Former Navy officials warn that sustaining such a fleet could crowd out funding for everything else — from existing ships to next-generation aircraft — unless older vessels are retired early

Industry analysts were quick to note that the proposal also runs against the Navy’s own recent strategy, which emphasizes smaller, unmanned, and more distributed maritime systems rather than large, crew-heavy ships.

December 23, 2025 - Posted by | Militarism |

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