Cost and risk questions raised over US battleship plan

The first of the US Navy’s proposed guided missile battleships would carry a procurement cost of between $17.6 billion and $18.9 billion if bought in FY2030, with subsequent ships estimated at $12.2 billion to $13.1 billion each, a paper prepared for Members of Congress states.

The figures come from the Congressional Budget Office and are quoted in Congressional Research Service paper IF13142, updated on 20 January 2026 and written by naval affairs specialist Ronald O’Rourke. Both estimates are expressed in FY2025 dollars and assume a displacement of 35,000 tons.

The cost of the lead ship includes the nonrecurring detailed design costs for the whole class, reflecting the traditional Navy practice of loading all or most of that expense onto the first hull. Costs for later ships would depend on the rate at which they are procured and on other factors.

Set against existing programmes, the numbers are substantial. A DDG-51 destroyer currently costs around $2.7 billion when procured at a rate of two per year. CVN-81, an aircraft carrier procured in FY2019, carries an estimated procurement cost of about $15.2 billion in the Navy’s FY2026 budget submission, which is less than the estimate for the first BBG(X).

The Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations concept calls for spreading sensors and weapons across a wider array of ships and aircraft, and the paper poses the question of whether concentrating so much capability in individual hulls sits comfortably with an approach designed to avoid “putting too many eggs into one basket”.

Budgetary displacement is a third issue, as legislators may examine what effect designing and procuring the ships would have on funding available for other Navy priorities, and what the net impact on future capabilities and funding requirements would be of acquiring BBG(X)s instead of DDG(X)s. The DDG(X), estimated at about 14,500 tons and once envisaged for procurement in the early 2030s, is reportedly to be suspended as a consequence of the battleship programme starting.

Technical maturity forms the fourth, indeed, the paper asks how much programme-execution risk, meaning risk of cost growth, schedule delay or technical difficulty, the effort would carry, and whether new technologies the Navy says are to be incorporated into the design will be ready in time. Two are named specifically, an electromagnetic railgun and higher-power lasers, both of which require further development and would need to be mature enough by the early 2030s to go into the ships.

The U.S. Navy envisages a class of 15 to 25 ships forming part of the Golden Fleet plan, a forthcoming force-structure plan that is to replace the current 381-ship plan. Notices of two intended contract awards for design work were posted on 22 December 2025 with estimated periods of performance of six years, and because each ship could take several years to build, a first vessel procured in the early 2030s might not enter service until the late 2030s or around 2040.

The lead ship is intended to be named Defiant, with the class known either as the Defiant class or the Trump class.