National Review Online
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
President Donald Trump announced a new “Golden Fleet” of
warships for the U.S. Navy during a press conference on Monday. The reveal that
drew the president’s and the public’s interest was the proposed “Trump-class”
battleships that would be “100 times more powerful than any battleship ever
built.” He claimed these would be the largest-ever battleships, larger even
than the Iowa-class behemoths. The battleships would be a buffet of
firepower, from nuclear-capable missiles to rail guns and even the return of
conventional cannon batteries for cost-efficient land-based strikes. Beyond
that, he intimated that there would be a new direction for aircraft carriers,
which would mean cutting short the Ford-class program. The most
immediately beneficial news flew under the radar, however.
In between criticizing the “much smaller” ships of the
current Navy and touting the purported firepower of the Trump class, the
president announced that the Navy expects to have multiple of its newest FF(X)
frigates in the water sometime in 2028. That’s an astonishingly short period of
time for a surface fleet that has seen its littoral combat ship (LCS) and Constellation-class
building programs run over budget and over schedule since the Aughts. The
expedited timetable is a result of Huntington Ingalls Industries and its Korean
counterparts, Hanwha and HD Hyundai, cribbing the U.S. Coast Guard’s
Legend-class cutter’s build specifications. That provides a proven ship design
protected from those agents of delay, Naval Sea Systems Command (the navy’s
in-house ship engineers) and other design meddlers.
The FF(X), expected to have a crew of 140 sailors, will
have a relatively simple, straightforward mission compared with the Swiss Army
knife roles imagined for the ill-fated LCS and Constellation. The FF(X)
is expected to eventually be the “mothership” for uncrewed surface vessels,
expanding its offensive and defensive capabilities without overburdening the
418-foot vessel with a relatively slight displacement of 4,500 tons. (For
comparison, the few Constellation-class frigates in production have a
displacement of 7,300 tons.) This, then, is a ship that is intended to relieve
its destroyer brethren of duties that do not suit the larger, more heavily
armed, and thinly spread Arleigh-Burkes.
The sort of mission appropriate for such a ship has been
in the news lately.
The last successful frigate class, the Oliver Hazard
Perry, built in the ’80s to hunt Russian subs, found themselves out of a
job with the fall of the Soviet empire. However, they soon found a niche as
drug-hunting vessels, with many of the Perry-class frigates winning
honors for cocaine busts in the Caribbean and Pacific.
Overall, the current Navy has fallen to fewer than 300
ships, only 30-some years after the high of 594 under Reagan. While the U.S.
retains a tonnage advantage over China, it’s only a matter of time before the
Chinese navy catches up, given its tremendous shipbuilding advantage and hybrid
approach to civilian-military shipyards.
It is a relief to hear a president give more than lip
service to what has become a crisis for our ability to project power and do it
with ships that are built to succeed in their given roles. The battleships that
could arrive in the latter part of the 2030s are certainly exciting to think
about, although there will be many obstacles to getting there (we will need
much more building capacity than we have now and yet more technological
advances). It’s the workmanlike FF(X) that arrives in two years, though, that
means the “Golden Fleet” deserves a hearty BRAVO ZULU.
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