{"id":54934,"date":"2026-05-03T09:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T09:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/54934\/"},"modified":"2026-05-03T09:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T09:53:09","slug":"a-wwii-era-battleship-is-back-in-trumps-1-5t-defense-budget-experts-say-its-an-easy-target","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/54934\/","title":{"rendered":"A WWII-era battleship is back in Trump’s $1.5T defense budget. Experts say it’s an easy target"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump last month announced<\/a> a record-setting $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal year 2027. But in that towering proposal, experts say there\u2019s obvious signs of waste and overspend.<\/p>\n

A recent Cato Institute report identified several weapons in next year\u2019s defense budget request that the think tank deems unnecessary and ineffective. Among them is a battleship Trump announced<\/a> in December, which the president named after himself. But the ship, in this case, the \u201cTrump-class\u201d battleship is what the Cato Institute considers to be technology so obsolete, as it\u2019s from a time before the states of Alaska and Hawaii even existed.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the issue: the U.S. Navy hasn\u2019t operated a battleship since the last Iowa-class vessel was retired in 1992, a type of vessel which hasn\u2019t even been constructed since the mid-20th century. The Trump-class battleship, which the Department of Defense is requesting upwards of $1 billion to build, will inherently be stuck in WWII, and would be rendered helpless against modern-day weapons. In fact, despite the billion-dollar price tag, Cato puts the true cost at $20 billion apiece, and it still won\u2019t be able to subvert modern-day, advanced anti-ship missiles.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe haven\u2019t used this since World War II,\u201d Ben Giltner, policy analyst at Cato Institute, told Fortune, \u201cbecause the aircraft was able to pick it off in the ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n

Giltner said this type of ship shouldn\u2019t even be on the Defense Department\u2019s list: it\u2019s not an aircraft carrier, meaning it can\u2019t carry jets or other supplies. The proposed Trump-class vessel lacks all usefulness in this and future conflicts because of its incompatibility with modern weapons technology.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why experts say Trump\u2019s battleship is a waste of money<\/p>\n

The defense funding request would just pile onto a $39 trillion national debt, one which recently surpassed 100% of GDP<\/a> for the first time since WWII. While defense spending as a share of GDP remains far below its mid-20th century peak, Cato estimates the U.S. would need to cut spending or raise taxes by $827 billion annually to prevent the debt-to-GDP ratio from doubling by 2054, a figure that rivals entire past defense budgets<\/a>. The $1.5 trillion proposal is a 44% increase from last year\u2019s budget request. While Congress is unlikely to fund the entire proposal, the request signals the direction of the Trump administration\u2019s defense ambitions.<\/p>\n

Giltner said Cato\u2019s estimated $20 billion price tag on a single battleship is a conservative estimate, one which only takes into account the acquisition and procurement of the vessel. That estimate, Giltner said, fails to take into account the long-term expenses associated with the standard upkeep of a ship and for specialized training required for ship crew.<\/p>\n

Instead of adding to the debt, Giltner said that opting to pay down the debt would be a better allocation of tax dollars. \u201cWe could be doing something even as simple as helping to pay down the debt, the interest on the debt right now, which is absolutely enormous,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s $49 billion to weapons with \u2018a lot of flaws\u2019<\/p>\n

Trump said the Navy aims to have about 20 to 25 battleships, with construction of the first battleship, the U.S.S. Defiant, targeted to begin in the early 2030s.<\/p>\n

Navy Secretary John Phelan said during the new class\u2019s announcement in December that the Navy \u201cdesperately needs\u201d the battleships. \u201cThe future Trump-class battleship, the U.S.S. Defiant, will be the largest, deadliest, and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world\u2019s oceans,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Following the budget request announcement in April, JPMorgan said the proposal signals a fundamental shift in how Washington views military investment.<\/p>\n

\u201cA global security environment that is less reliant on norms and more reliant on force continues to put upward pressure on defense spending; at the same time, the Trump administration is seeking to remake the U.S. defense industrial base, and there is more capital entering the sector as well,\u201d JPMorgan said<\/a> in a note.<\/p>\n

In addition to the battleship, the Cato Institute report listed four other weapons systems it deemed wasteful: the F-35<\/a>; the LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), an updated version of the U.S.\u2019s existing ICBM system, estimated to cost $4.6 billion; the F-47<\/a> stealth aircraft, estimated at $5 billion; and Trump\u2019s Golden Dome<\/a> missile defense shield, which carries a total estimated cost of up to $1.1 trillion. Together with the battleship, those systems would cost the U.S. nearly $49 billion in 2027 alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese weapons systems, as I point out, they just have a lot of flaws,\u201d Giltner said. \u201cSo then the question is, \u2018why are we spending all this money on these certain systems in the first place?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump last month announced a record-setting $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal year 2027. But in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6661,6660,399,12367,2362,12,74,1437],"class_list":{"0":"post-54934","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-donald-trump","8":"tag-and-defense","9":"tag-arms","10":"tag-defense","11":"tag-defense-budget","12":"tag-department-of-defense","13":"tag-donald-trump","14":"tag-trump","15":"tag-weapons"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116510039704016381","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}