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.