The Golden Fleet’s Battleship Will Never Sail
Commentary by Mark F. Cancian, Center for Strategic and International Studies
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| US Navy website, the Golden Fleet |
On December 22, Donald Trump announced a new class of “battleships” that will be 100 times more powerful than previous battleships and larger than any other surface combatant on the oceans. The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion. However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail. It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.
Design: The ship’s design will take many years.
At the “30,000
to 40,000” tons cited by the president, the ship is much larger than
anything the United States has built in the last 80 years, other than aircraft
carriers. The truncated DDG-1000 class (only three built) displaced 15,000 tons
but still took
11 years from program initiation (2005) to commissioning of the first
ship (2016). The battleship will be more than twice as large and more
complicated—nuclear-capable with directed-energy weapons. The first ship,
USS Defiant (BBG-1), is likely to commission in the early- to
mid-2030s, assuming it is built at all.
Cost: The cost will be extremely high. The
DDG-51 class flight III (the current version of this destroyer class) displaces
9,000 tons and costs $2.8 billion each. A ship four times as large would not
cost four times as much, but would still be much more expensive. The
Congressional Budget Office estimated that a future destroyer of 14,500 tons
would cost $4.4
billion or $300,000 per ton. That would imply a battleship cost of about
$9.1 billion, allowing for some economies of scale. Lead ships are typically 50
percent more expensive than the average, so BBG 1 would likely cost $13.5
billion, about as much as an aircraft carrier.
The cost might be even higher because of inflation in the
shipbuilding sector. For example, building the battleship will require
thousands of experienced shipyard workers, even as there is a labor
shortage, and shipyards are bidding against each other for personnel....
Read the entire analysis at The
Golden Fleet’s Battleship Will Never Sail
Mark F. Cancian (Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve,
ret.) is a senior adviser with the Defense and Security Department at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
The US Navy has created its own surreal website for this “Golden
Fleet” at Golden Fleet
