From what we know of President Trump’s upcoming “battleship” project, it roughly adheres to the historical standard of the Iowa-class battleships—but has several key differences. 

What’s in a name? Quite a lot when you’re classifying a ship of war. Warships are about more than battle capacity. They convey messages about national purpose and power—helping mold opinion among key audiences in wartime and peacetime alike. How you classify and construct a vessel contributes to—or could detract from—the political value of sea power.

This comes to mind because President Donald Trump has launched a thoroughgoing overhaul of the US Navy’s fleet design dubbed the “Golden Fleet.” As part of the initiative—which also includes a new-design frigate, a medium landing ship for hauling US Marines from island to island, and unmanned vehicles of all sorts—Trump and his foreign-policy lieutenants recently unveiled plans for a major surface combatant styled the “Trump-class battleship.” The new fighting ship, the first of which will be christened Defiant—an awe-inspiring name for a ship of war, by the way—will displace between 30,000 and 40,000 tons, while packing 128 Mk 41 vertical launch cells, 12 “continuous prompt strike” launchers capable of lofting hypersonic missiles, a pair of lightweight 5-inch deck guns, and an electromagnetic railgun. The ships will run some $10–15 billion per unit.

The administration wants up to 25 such vessels to anchor the Golden Fleet. At that price, and given manifold competing demands on US shipbuilding resources, the politics of such an acquisition are bound to be daunting in this less-than-bipartisan epoch.

What Exactly Is a Battleship?

It may be politically desirable to call the new behemoths battleships, but do they really qualify? The answer is blurry, judging from what we know to date.

To take stock of the Trump class, let’s start with Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan’s classic definition of a “capital ship.” For him, capital ships were a fleet’s heavy hitters, capable of standing in a fight against peer battle fleets. Mahan, America’s fin de siècle evangelist of sea power, proclaimed that “the backbone and real power of any navy are the vessels which, by a due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks. All others are but subservient to these, and exist only for them.” Capital ships steamed in company with a retinue of destroyers and lesser craft. But they constituted the core of the fleet’s fighting power. They could dish out and take fearsome punishment.

Armored, steam-propelled, big-gun battleships were the largest and brawniest of capital ships in Mahan’s day and beyond. Whether the Trump class lives up to that legacy is arguable. That’s in part because Defiant’s dimensions remain somewhat vague. It is unclear whether the 30,000–40,000 tonnage range depicts an empty hull or one fully loaded with ammunition and stores of all kinds. Either way, the Trump class would be the largest surface combatant in any naval inventory by far. The Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyer, more accurately labeled a cruiser, bulks just under 16,000 tons. The Chinese navy’s Renhai-class destroyer, likewise a cruiser, weighs in at some 13,000 tons.

Fully loaded or not, the Trump class will almost certainly fall well short of the 58,000 tons or so for fully loaded Iowa-class battlewagons, the last such class in the US. Navy. However, Trump-class combatants could match or even surpass the dimensions of the South Dakota class, the immediate predecessors to the Iowas. For instance, USS Massachusetts, the South Dakota-class dreadnought I see every day on my way to and from work, displaced just under 38,000 tons empty, but exceeded 44,000 tons by far when toting a full load. That overlaps with the tonnage figures given for Defiant. And the Trump class would outweigh pre-South Dakota battleships, such as those comprising the renowned Great White Fleet, by a wide margin.

If It Looks Like a Battleship and Sails Like a Battleship…

Tonnage-wise, then, Defiant falls squarely in the historical range typical of battleships. And the classification, size, and look of a warship do matter. They convey an impression of majesty and warlike prowess. A navy that operates battleships can portray itself as the likely winner in any marine clash of arms. That may be why Trump—long fixated on aesthetics in every part of his public life—obsesses over the opinion-making aspects of fleet design. In other words, there is logic to his advocacy, no matter how zany it might seem. Ships are political implements. Strategist Edward Luttwak pointed out half a century ago that peacetime strategic competition at sea hinges in large part on how audiences that are able to influence the outcome of the competition gauge the balance of power between the contenders. Whichever contestant they judge stronger from inspecting a ship or fleet in peacetime tends to “win” in peacetime competition.

People rally to likely victors. These audiences—chiefly foreign societies and governments—might be unschooled in naval affairs. Yet their opinions count all the same. In fact, they can be decisive in a war for perceptions. Ergo, a ship’s scale, appearance, and what it’s called can shape success or failure at sea. Labeling Defiant a battleship, and making its design look impressive, could have direct political import in such embattled expanses as the Indo-Pacific. 

Reality Hasn’t Yet Caught Up to the Trump-Class’ Vision

Apart from proportions and aesthetics, though, many question marks linger. First, think back to the Mahanian taxonomy of capital ships. Defiant carries very light offensive armament relative to its size. While it will boast hypersonic munitions, a good thing, it will carry the same number of these rounds as the Zumwalts, vessels half its displacement or less. It barely aces out a vintage Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruiser in the number of vertical launch silos, with 128 cells to 122, despite displacing at least triple as much as a Ticonderoga. Magazine depth is also a potential issue. Iowa-class battleships housed just over 1,200 16-inch .50-caliber main gun rounds—unguided projectiles, admittedly—in their magazines. Defiant will mount the same number of 5-inch guns as a Ticonderoga, at two. That’s a fraction of the six two-gun mounts on board the Iowa class during their 1980s-1990 service lives, and ten during their 1940s-1960s lives.

That leaves the electromagnetic railgun the vessel will supposedly sport, which could indeed constitute a game-changing capability if it proves out. The trouble is, US Navy magnates canceled railgun development back in 2021. Now, Japan has persevered with this novel technology and reportedly tested such a weapon successfully last November. Tokyo would undoubtedly share railgun technology with an ally it regards as a “cornerstone” of Japanese national security. Whether discussions of technology sharing fed into the Trump-class project has yet to be disclosed, however. 

In short, many questions remain to be answered surrounding Defiant’s offensive striking power. It may be that a hull with volume and electrical power capacity to spare for exotic future weaponry could justify the imposing price tag for each Trump-class ship. But that’s far from obvious at this juncture. 

Can the Trump-Class Battleship Take a Beating?

And second, there’s the defensive side of Mahan’s capital-ship formula. Naval architects of yore regarded defensive strength chiefly as a passive thing. They assumed battleships would be hit in action. Resilience was their watchword. Accordingly, they outfitted battlewagons with stout, artfully placed armor capable of withstanding heavy blows from rival capital ships. In fact, the standard thumb rule for whether a battleship was a battleship was whether it could absorb a hit from its own main gun battery and fight on. Indeed, it’s questionable whether Iowa-class “fast battleships” deserved the title of battleship. They were too lightly armored to meet the customary standard. Battlecruiser might have been a more fitting moniker for even those hulking ships of war. And if the Iowa class couldn’t live up to the historic benchmark, can the Trump class? 

Now, there is scope for debate about the nomenclature. Surface-warship design philosophy has undergone a radical break since World War II, owing to the debut of guided missiles and, now, drones. Ship design today largely dispenses with armor—departing from the age of the battleship. Nowadays the paramount goal is to mount a forward defense far from the ship, shooting the “archer,” an enemy ship or plane, before he can release his “arrow,” or anti-ship munition. In other words, the point is not to be able to take a punch, but to avoid ever needing to take one, obviating the need for armor. Accordingly, combatants brandish an array of gee-whiz radars, computer battle-management systems, and defensive missiles to ward off attack at long range. Defiant will be outfitted with a standard panoply of lesser-caliber guns, surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, directed-energy weapons as they mature, and counter-drone weaponry. Its defensive armament is nothing special compared with what lesser vessels deploy. Nor, judging from the scant information disclosed thus far, will Defiant be ruggedly constructed in the manner of battleships of old.

Whether a warship warrants classification as a battleship absent armor sheathing is worth pondering when evaluating the Trump class. Call me a cranky old battleship sailor, which I am. But to award the Trump class the title of battleship, I would prefer a far more Mahanian mix of offensive and defensive armament combined with armor comparable to that shielding a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier’s innards. As a crude standard, one imagines that Mahan would counsel that firepower and other attributes should increase in proportion to a warship’s displacement. Double or triple the displacement, double or triple the armament and protection. 

Keeping things in proportion would yield a capital ship worth its weight. Maybe even a battleship.