WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is expected to announce plans Monday to build a new, large warship that President Donald Trump is calling a “battleship” as part of a larger vision to create a “Golden Fleet,” according to people familiar with the plans.
Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who is now a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and familiar with the discussions, said the announcement will include a new, large “surface combatant class” of ship and as many as 50 support ships.
The announcement will come just a month after the Navy scrapped its plans to build a new, small warship, citing growing delays and cost overruns, deciding instead to go with a modified version of a Coast Guard cutter that was being produced until recently.
Trump is to be joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan for what is being billed by the White House as a “major announcement.”
Trump plans to discuss a shipbuilding initiative, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
It’s being unveiled at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort while he vacations in Florida and as U.S. forces take part in operations in the Caribbean that Trump says are aimed at stemming the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. and beyond and mounting pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government.
Montgomery said that while he supports the idea to build more support ships, he was critical of the plan to build a new battleship-like warship.
Historically, the term battleship has referred to a very specific type of ship — a large, heavily armored vessel armed with massive guns designed to bombard other ships or targets ashore. This type of ship was at the height of prominence during World War II, and the largest of the U.S. battleships, the Iowa-class, were roughly 60,000 tons.
After World War II, the battleship’s role in modern fleets diminished rapidly in favor of aircraft carriers and long-range missiles. The U.S. Navy did modernize four Iowa-class battleships in the 1980s by adding cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, along with modern radars, but by the 1990s all four were decommissioned.
Trump has long held strong opinions on specific aspects of the Navy’s fleet, sometimes with a view toward keeping older technology instead of modernizing.
During his first term, he unsuccessfully called for the return to steam-powered catapults to launch jets from the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers instead of the more modern electromagnetic system.
He has also complained to Phelan about the look of the Navy’s destroyers and decried Navy ships being covered in rust.
Phelan told senators at his confirmation hearing that Trump “has texted me numerous times very late at night, sometimes after one (o’clock) in the morning” about “rusty ships or ships in a yard, asking me what am I doing about it.”
On a visit to a shipyard that was working on the now-canceled Constellation-class frigate in 2020, Trump said he personally changed the design of the ship.
“I looked at it, I said, ‘That’s a terrible-looking ship, let’s make it beautiful,’” Trump said at the time.
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