Trump’s ‘battleship’ is a monument to the president’s ego

DS-1 Obs and Bbgn-1. The first acronym stands for ‘Death Star Orbital Battle Station’ and refers to the planetoid built as a weapon of mass destruction in Star Wars. The second refers to a “Nuclear-powered Guided-missile Battleship”, a nuclear-powered battleship equipped with guided missiles which is said to be the largest and most heavily armed battleship in the US fleet. It is reportedly to be named “Defiant” and will be the lead ship of a new class: the “Trump-class Battleship”.

Like the Death Star (“La Morte Nera” in the Italian version), the Defiant is also a symbol of power and hubris. Indeed, for now, it is the thing that comes closest to it. Starting with its classification as a battleship – a term laden with historical and symbolic significance, evoking battleships equipped with enormous guns and heavy armour, but which today also echoes the Galactic Empire’s Battle Station. The Defiant represents a reinterpretation of the battleship concept for the age of hypersonic missiles: a gigantic platform, an arsenal ship equipped with nuclear-capable cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, electromagnetic cannons (a technology still in the experimental stage) and high-powered lasers. According to data from the Congressional Research Service, it is expected to be between 256 and 268 metres long, with a gross tonnage of 35,000 tonnes when fully loaded; this weight is due primarily to electronic systems, radar, missiles, launch cells, energy infrastructure and reactors that will be able to propel it to over 30 knots and transform it into a floating power station. In short, the BBGN-1 could simultaneously serve as a missile arsenal, a command ship, a radar platform, an air defence hub, a hypersonic platform, an energy platform, an electronic warfare centre and a strategic deterrent.

“They will be the largest surface combatants built by the US Navy since the Second World War,” said Secretary of the Navy John Phelan shortly before being removed from his post by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. Ironically, Phelan – a businessman with no military experience but who boasted a personal relationship with the President – was one of the biggest supporters of the Trump Class, whilst Hegseth regarded it as a “distraction” from his strategy of smaller, unmanned vessels. In this instance, Hegseth had been forced to humour his boss, but Phelan subsequently fell victim to his own project due to his inability to see it through and boost shipbuilding output. He even went so far as to suggest that it might be necessary to rely on European shipyards, whilst Trump’s imperative was that the ships must be built in the United States using American steel.

The Trump-class, in fact, forms part of a wider initiative known as the ‘Golden Fleet’, through which the Trump administration aims to revitalise the shipbuilding industry and counter the growing numerical superiority of the Chinese navy, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), which has over 370 vessels compared with the US Navy’s approximately 290, with projections indicating that the gap will widen. The United States still retains significant qualitative advantages in high-end vessels, submarines, carrier-based aviation and network-centred warfare, but quality cannot fully compensate for numerical superiority, which enhances reconnaissance capabilities and facilitates saturation attacks through concentrated fire.

The ‘Trump-class’ project, therefore, did not disappear following Phelan’s dismissal, but passed from Phelan’s hands to those of his successor, Hung Cao, who has continued to promote it unchallenged, stating that his priorities include ‘building the platforms we need to defend this country’. A descendant of a Vietnamese family that sought refuge in the United States shortly before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Cao has an impressive military CV and is a staunch Trump supporter. He also enjoys an excellent relationship with Hegseth, with whom he shares a similar rhetoric: during a debate, he said that the army needs “alpha males and alpha females who will rip each other’s guts out and eat them”.

Once again, internal power struggles – and above all those that the website ‘Mer et Marine’ has described as ‘Trump’s whims’ – have overshadowed the strategic aspect. The key question is whether the cost of the project justifies the decision. And the cost is astronomical: around 23.4 billion dollars for the first vessel and around 275 billion for a programme of 15 ships. To assess this, one must consider whether, in an era where naval warfare tends to distribute sensors and weapons across a greater number of ships and platforms – as suggested by the American doctrine of Distributed Maritime Operations – it makes sense to create a gigantic vessel capable of concentrating extraordinary firepower within a single hull.

The assessment is almost philosophical, speculative. Admiral Roberto Domini, president of Cesmar, the Centre for Geopolitical and Maritime Strategy Studies, offers his views for Il Foglio. “Today’s warfare is multi-domain; it is fought on land, at sea and in the air, and then there is the cyber and cognitive aspects. What does all this mean? That certain tasks cannot be carried out by a small-tonnage vessel. It must be equipped to manage all events in a coordinated and harmonious manner; it must be dual-hulled and have the capacity to manage multiple platforms – manned and unmanned – more effectively.” However, the admiral himself expresses doubts about such a concentration of power. “In theory, you can fit a lot of missiles onto this strategic, multi-purpose platform. But as we’ve already seen today, American stockpiles are empty – so once you’ve used up the missiles on board, what do you do? You can’t reload at sea – or at least it’s very difficult – so you’d have to go into port, but if you’re in a situation where you don’t have a proper base, it becomes difficult. So it’s true that you have plenty of missiles, but the difficulty lies in reloading and then deploying them in the field. Because if you’re under attack from a huge number of drones, it’s not as though you can use missiles to hit drones.” The admiral then envisages a crisis over Taiwan. In the waters around the island, China has a huge number of anti-ship missiles and reconnaissance and targeting systems, and a gigantic ship becomes an extremely valuable target: its destruction would have enormous propaganda and strategic value.

In reality, the idea for the battleship was conceived to support the American shipbuilding industry. As Alex Lee, a defence analyst, writes in an article for the Centre for Maritime Strategy, ‘building ships in the United States is very difficult due to the severe neglect of the shipbuilding industry, sky-high costs and political paralysis’. It is the entire naval system that is in crisis. This was demonstrated by the recent incident involving the aircraft carrier Lincoln, which was forced to remain at sea for an extended period, putting a severe strain on both the crew and all on-board systems, including the sanitary facilities. A few months earlier, there was an even more serious incident: the missile destroyer ‘Benfold’ had drifted adrift in the South China Sea due to a generator failure.

The crisis within the US Navy is worsening, largely due to Trump’s ‘whims’ in even more technical areas. On 13 August, for example, the President ordered a study into how to reintroduce steam catapults on future aircraft carriers, casting doubt on the validity of electromagnetic catapults just as this system was beginning to demonstrate its capabilities – a field in which the United States had been a pioneer. This is a technically problematic choice with enormous costs, made all the more serious because the rationale lies not in the technology itself, but in Trump’s conviction that ‘steam is more reliable, whilst electromagnetic systems are too complicated to understand’. This narrative resonates with his electorate: supporting ‘traditional, working-class, field-repairable’ systems, as opposed to ‘elitist, academic, contractor-dependent’ ones.

“Politicians are in charge of governance; political decisions are the prerogative of politics, but when politicians seek to take over or manage the governance of the armed forces, that’s when the problems begin,” comments Admiral Domini. And that is exactly what President Trump has done and continues to do. He began by sacking Admiral Lisa Franchetti, head of Naval Operations. “Trump sacked her simply because he was convinced she’d been put in that position just because she was a woman,” says Admiral Domini. “I knew her and I can say that if she reached that position, it was because she’d gained the experience that led her to become a commander.” Indeed, over a forty-year career, Franchetti has held all the most senior posts in the US Navy, including command of two ‘carrier strike groups’ – a formation comprising a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and an escort of destroyers, cruisers and submarines. Also as part of his crusade against appointments which, in his view, were a consequence of the ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) campaign, Trump had sacked another female admiral: Coast Guard Commander Linda L. Fagan.

In April 2025, Hegseth had also sacked Vice Admiral Nancy Lacore, who had a 35-year military career, was a helicopter pilot and commander in the Navy Reserve.

But Trump and his right-hand man Hegseth did not confine themselves to women or those allegedly favoured by God. “It is worth investigating why the US Navy has dismissed more than twenty commanders in a single year. It is true that there are many ships, but twenty commanders is really too many,” says a perplexed Admiral Domini. The same admiral recalls another episode, little known but even more significant: the case of the aircraft carrier Miller. The US Navy is considering changing the name of the aircraft carrier currently under construction, CVN-81, which was due to be named after Doris ‘Dorie’ Miller, the African-American hero of Pearl Harbor, and would have been the first American aircraft carrier dedicated to an African-American. Now, however, that decision is in danger of being scrapped. Two sources have told CNN that one of the options under discussion is to name the ship after Trump – the first to be named after a sitting president. It is on this very aircraft carrier that the president would like steam catapults to be installed instead of the “overly complicated” electromagnetic ones. This change will further delay the work, to the extent that the aircraft carrier will not be delivered before 2034.

By one of those significant coincidences that often mark the course of history, 2034 is the year in which the Third World War will break out. This is the premise of "2034: The Novel of the Next World War" by Elliot Ackerman, a specialist in investigative non-fiction, and Admiral James Stavridis, who formerly headed NATO forces in Europe. The novel is a catalogue of parallels with current events: from the ‘incidents’ in the South China Sea, to electronic warfare, right through to a woman being put in command of a destroyer; but above all, it highlights the Chinese Navy’s astonishing technological capabilities, enabling it to neutralise the electronic systems of US fleet vessels in the Indo-Pacific thanks to cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

In 2024, it seemed as though the plot of the novel was partly coming true. According to independent media and online outlets in Hong Kong and Taiwan – a story subsequently amplified by various social media accounts and commentators in Taiwan – it was reported that the US Navy and the Chinese Navy had engaged in intense electronic warfare in the South China Sea near the Philippines. Consequently, American warships “faced an unprecedented crisis” and the fleet withdrew due to a severe disruption to their communication and navigation capabilities. There is no confirmation of this “electronic battle”, and the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Defence stated clearly: “I have not heard of this situation”.

The report is almost certainly false but certainly plausible: the list of technologies introduced onto the ships of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy is constantly evolving. Furthermore, Beijing is investing not only in naval vessels but also in personnel, strategic doctrine, logistics and organisational structures, and is developing operational practices and a culture of command. “This does not mean that the US Armed Forces have suddenly become a paper tiger,” conceded the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the Global Times. “Quite simply, Washington has left the era of unchallenged dominance behind.”

As in so many narratives, this one concludes with a moral—or, more precisely, a twist of fate. In the mid-term elections, Nancy Lacore, who had been dismissed by Hegseth, was also elected. She is likely to be among those who will have to vote in the new impeachment trial.