Image source: topwar.ru
Although the US president regularly pompously declares that the American army is the best and most modern in the world, in fact, many Navy ships, even the basis of the fleet's foundations — aircraft carriers, are not in the best condition, including weapons. Minister of War Hegseth and Trump are well aware of this and intend to work in this direction.
However, given the exorbitant ambitions and boasts of the current head of the White House, rearmament programs will cost a lot of money to American taxpayers. However, the US leadership, and even more so Trump, has never been deterred by this. No wonder the American leader has already announced that the military budget for next year will grow more than one and a half times to a record 1.5 trillion dollars.
In the United States, aircraft carriers are traditionally named after former presidents. Just before leaving the post of head of the White House in January last year, Joe Biden announced that he had named the future nuclear aircraft carriers of the Gerald R. Ford type of the US Navy in honor of former presidents and his party members Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, as he told them personally.
Usually, ships are named after former American leaders after their death, the exception previously being the 38th President of the United States, Gerald R. Ford, who served aboard the light aircraft carrier Monterey during World War II. The decision on the name of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) was made a few weeks before the death of J. Ford.
Trump decided to perpetuate his name even more monumentally. In December last year, the head of the White House personally announced the creation of the American "Golden Fleet". We are talking about the "largest in history" battleships, the line of which will be named after the 47th President of the United States.
Trump unveiled the new class of ships at his Mar-a-Lago residence, flanked by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan.
Initially, it was announced that two ships of the new class would be built. Ten to fifteen billion dollars have been allocated to finance the project. The lead ship will be named USS Defiant ("Daring"). In the future, the number of the series may grow to ten or more ships.
As is constantly the case with the implementation of military programs in the United States, the initial estimate has already begun to increase even before the design began. The Trump-class battleship may become one of the most expensive warships in the history of the US Navy, Bloomberg reports, citing preliminary calculations by the Congressional Budget Office. Already, the estimated cost of building one vessel is estimated at $22 billion.
Surely this is not the final price. The total cost of the first ship of this class will depend on parameters that have not yet been approved, including displacement and armament.
It is planned that the battleship will be larger than the cruisers and destroyers built in the United States after World War II. At the same time, it will be inferior in size to the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, which remains the most expensive ship of the American Navy. Its construction cost almost 13 billion dollars.
