The Navy plans to award a sole source contract to the service’s two largest shipbuilders, General Dynamics (GD) Bath Iron Works and Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) Ingalls Shipbuilding, for the Donald Trump administration’s new battleship design.
In December, Trump and senior administration officials announced plans for a new class of battleships named after the president, starting with the future USS Defiant (BBG-1). These battleships are billed as anchoring a new Golden Fleet plan that will replace the Navy’s current 381-ship force structure plan. The Navy has not yet released details of the Golden Fleet plan.
The 30,000 to 40,000 ton battleships – less than half the size of an aircraft carrier – would carry the nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) and serve as a command and control platform for drones and other ships, Navy Secretary John Phelan has said. Phelan provided the details when Trump first announced his eponymous Trump-class BBG(X) battleships.
According to a Dec. 22 Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) notice, it intends to award a contract to the shipbuilders to work together on battleship design and engineering for a six-year period. This was released concurrently with the announcement of plans to award a similar contract to Leidos‘ Gibbs & Cox subsidiary to conduct surface combatant ship design engineering. The GD-HII notice said the design work will include “shipbuilder engineering and design analysis necessary to produce BBG(X) design products in support of Navy-led design for BBG(X). GD and HII both currently produce the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and were working on the expected future DDG(X) destroyer before the Trump administration announced BBG(X) will supersede those plans.
A Dec. 30 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report underscored that initial plans for the BBG(X) make it larger and more heavily armed than any cruiser or destroyer procured by the Navy since World War II. The report said the two initial ships will reportedly not be procured until the early 2030s, in line with the six year-long development timeline in the awards to Gibbs & Cox, GD and HII. Given the likely timeline of producing such ships, they would likely enter service in the late 2030s or 2040.
The CRS report notes that while the procurement cost of BBG(X) is still uncertain, analysts find Navy ship costs are roughly proportional to ship displacement. This means the battleship could be over 3.6 times the cost of a DDG-51 destroyer. The destroyers cost about $2.7 billion each when procured at a rate of two per year, but cost more when procuring only one at a time.
“This suggests a recurring unit procurement cost for the BBG(X) design of roughly $10 billion. The first BBG(X) might cost closer to $15 billion, because its procurement cost (following Navy budgeting practices) would incorporate detailed design costs for the class that could amount to a few billion additional dollars,” CRS said.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the defense and security department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), argued in a Dec. 23 commentary that the new BBG(X) would likely “never sail” while judging the cost as slightly less than the CRS estimate.
Cancian predicted BBG(X) would follow the curtailed three-ship Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 destroyer that took 11 years from program initiation to commissioning the first ship while the Trump-class battleships will be more than twice as large and more complicated, particularly given it being nuclear weapons-capable and fielding directed-energy weapons.
He agreed with CRS that cost is largely proportional to displacement, reiterating a Congressional Budget Office report estimating the notional DDG(X) future destroyer concept would likely cost up to $4.4 billion each. Cancian said this implies the battleship will cost $9.1 billion each, if allowing for economies of scale.
However, Cancian noted that lead ships are “typically 50 percent more expensive than the average, so BBG-1 would likely cost $13.5 billion, about as much as an aircraft carrier,” if not higher due to shipbuilding inflation.
SLCM-N would also be deployed on the Virginia-class submarines and would include a variant of the W80-4 air-launched cruise missile warhead. The W80-4 is something the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is already working on. NNSA did not immediately respond to a query on whether the battleship SLCM-N would also feature the W80-4 warhead.
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published a version of this story.