Several lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee last week were dubious of the Navy’s approach to the new Trump-class battleship in the fiscal year 2027 budget request.
“I don’t doubt for a minute your need, I don’t,” Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), ranking member of the subcommittee, told Navy officials May 12.
“But here’s what I need, a billion dollars in procurements for long lead items,” McCollum said. “We have no idea what the ship design is. Now we know how it will be fueled – nuclear. What munitions will it carry? How many people are going to be crewed on it, all the things that you’re going to have to put on the ship? And so I don’t doubt that you don’t need it, but I, as the fiduciary person that I’m supposed to be on this committee, that’s my constitutional responsibility.”
“I need to know what I’m buying,” McCollum said. The ship will be nuclear-powered, a top Naval officer told the subcommittee.
McCollum added she wants Navy officials to provide the committee with more information on the battleship by June 11.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle argued the Navy’s need for a large combatant is “pretty clear. We need significant payload volume for all future fights. We need that payload volume to scale, not only with the munitions we’re going to have today, but future munitions we don’t know. We need high electrical power density for directed energy, rail gun-type technologies that only that ship can produce.”
Caudle revealed the Navy bounced back and forth on how to power the battleship, but the service plans to use the nuclear reactor featured on the newest aircraft carriers.
“I’m thrilled that we finally landed on the fact that it’s going to be nuclear,” Caudle said. “That was the initial idea, and we batted around to deliver it sooner to make it conventional, and we came back around full circle to make it nuclear. And that’s the exact right answer. As a command and control ship that I can forward posture and run surface action groups out of, this is exactly the high end of a capital ship in the High-Low mix my instructions call out for,” the Navy’s top officer said.
McCollum argued the committee does not know key design characteristics of the battleship or even how many specific ships the Navy wants to buy. She was also skeptical of how many the Navy can afford to buy in light of so many other shipbuilding programs that have been dealing with cost overruns.
As recently as April, former Navy Secretary John Phelan told reporters the Navy was still figuring out if it would be nuclear powered and that, among other design choices, was preventing costs from being finalized. At the time Phelan said making it nuclear-powered was unlikely, but they were still trying to understand the proper trade offs (Defense Daily, April 21).
When asked by Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) about the benefits of using nuclear power, Caudle said they will use the existing Bechtel A1B nuclear power reactor design and related components used on the Ford-class carrier.
“So all of that technology that’s going into the design of the battleship, the nuclear battleship, from the reactor plant perspective is all pulled through technology from the Ford-class, as are most of the combat systems, radar system, missile systems [from the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer],” Caudle replied.
Caudle said given how the Navy will reuse existing power plant and combat systems, the major new elements of the battleship will be hull form, propulsion system as well as electrical and distribution systems.
“So there is some research that needs to be done on that,” he said. “But the fact it’s nuclear is going to give it the sustainment it needs, in particular in the Pacific. An ocean that’s three times the size of the Atlantic, I need that type of legs and endurance to serve as a capital ship.”
Caudle also argued the high payload capacity they expect to put on the battleship will help balance the re-arming limitations of current surface force ships.
“Getting to a place where I can actually re-arm is a challenge, so the more payload capacity a ship has, the less times I have to do that,” Caudle said.
Rep. Joseph Morelle (D-NY) interrogated Caudle on how many battleships they actually want and can support in the long term, with Caudle revealing it as likely upwards of 10.
The Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan released Monday first revealed the battleship would be nuclear-powered with provisional plans to build 15 through 2056.
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published a version of this story.