I ‘did not expect to be told to build a battleship,’ Navy’s surface warfare director says

The Navy was not planning to unveil a new class of ship last year, much less two, but November and December brought the cancellation of a frigate program, the launch of another, and the comeback—at least in name—of a type the service had largely deactivated by 1947.

The nascent Trump-class “battleship” will basically be a next-generation guided-missile destroyer “on steroids,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, said Wednesday during the Surface Navy Association symposium outside Washington, D.C. 

It caught the service by surprise.

“I did not expect to be told to build a battleship when I got this job,” Rear Adm. Derek Trinque, the Navy staff’s surface warfare director since June, said Tuesday. 

But as the service was trying to figure out how to best equip the DDG(X), they were running out of space on the ship, having to make the choice between outfitting it with the new Conventional Prompt Strike missile and a tried-and-true gun system.

“And so when national leaders announced that they were interested in building a battleship, this was a great opportunity for us,” Trinque said. “So the battleship will have Conventional Prompt Strike. It will have an incredible amount of offensive strike capability. It will have power for directed energy and future rail guns. It will give us capacity that we don’t have in any surface ship right now.”

It will also be the centerpiece of what the Trump administration has dubbed the Golden Fleet, which will include today’s submarines, destroyers, and aircraft carriers and newcomers such as the Marine Corps’ long-awaited medium landing ship. 

“I love the Arleigh Burke class. We’re gonna keep building them, but we just don’t have any more payload volume on it,” Caudle said. “So the battleship took the DDG(X) concept and it’s put that on steroids, under the assumption that the counter-targeting efforts of the Navy will protect it and make it survivable.”

That’s an assumption many experts outside the Navy deem implausible in an era of shipkilling ballistic missiles and ever-cheaper, more capable anti-ship drones.

The National Security Strategy, and the forthcoming National Defense Strategy, may have also opened up an opportunity for the Navy’s much-maligned littoral combat ship, which was originally envisioned to operate in shallow water along coastlines abroad.

With destroyers focusing on “high-end” missions, Trinque said, there’s room for the LCS to do the less involved work of countering narcotics trafficking, which has shot to the top of national security priorities in the past year.

“If it’s defending the territorial integrity of the United States against illegal trafficking, counter-narcotics, if it’s controlling sea lanes in a lower threat environment, then a small surface combatant should be in your toolkit,” Trinque said.

The Navy has 27 LCSs, having decided in 2023 to stop buying them and start retiring its earliest hulls. But the ones they have are still being put to work. 

“We have grown in our ability, in our dedication to those classes of ships, those two variants,” Trinque said. “We’re investing in lethality and survivability and sustainment in those ships.”

The plan is to back them up with the next-generation frigates, announced in December, with plans to have the first ship in the water by 2028.