Navy CNO says Golden Fleet battleship won’t be nuclear powered
The Navy’s new battleship is expected to be cutting-edge. But according to the service’s top officer, it won’t use nuclear propulsion.
President Donald Trump and Navy leadership unveiled plans last month for the 35,000-plus-ton vessel, which officials say will be armed with nuclear weapons, lasers, railguns and hypersonic missiles, among other capabilities. It is part of the vision for a so-called “Golden Fleet,” which is expected to include a new frigate, unmanned vessels and other assets.
Some of the Navy’s current platforms, including aircraft carriers and submarines, are powered by nuclear reactors — which give them extended endurance and eliminate the need for refueling during long deployments — while others use conventional systems.
“The question about nuclear power [for the battleship] — we looked at that,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle said Wednesday at the annual SNA symposium.
“I think it’s a logical question to think, hey, here’s a big capital ship. It’s going to be carrying a lot of load, you know, in places that we don’t necessarily need a strike enforcement air wing as a large ship there that’s in command of a flotilla … wouldn’t it be logical to be nuclear powered? And that brings a tail to the construction of that that just really fell outside the scope of what we want to do on the speed to get this thing in the water. And so what you trade off with, with persistency that only nuclear power can do, is you end up having, you know, the ability to go produce that — it pushes the battleship into a timeframe that just didn’t meet the operational need of the ship.”
A conceptual rendering of the vessel released by the Navy last month indicated that it will be gas turbine- and diesel-powered.
Caudle did not say exactly when the Navy aims to deliver the lead ship in the so-called Trump-class, but officials hope to have it online in the 2030s.
Trump has suggested that the platform would take two-and-a-half years to build, but analysts say it would likely take more than 10 years.
The battleship concept has its critics. It may cost upwards of $10 billion per vessel, and some analysts believe the Navy should instead be investing that funding elsewhere, such as Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
Caudle acknowledged that some observers are skeptical about the idea, but he touted its perceived advantages, calling it “badass.”
“When we say things, we just have biases, cognitive biases in our brain. And what comes to our brain is a thing that goes like, why is the Navy building that? Well, everything’s an evolution, okay. We just — we have Navy conventions for these things. But imagine this ship … [being] very fast, it can get anywhere in the world, can command and control operations, multi-mission, and it’s going to fall under the same counter-targeting umbrella as everything else I’ve got to protect. But then this thing can really mass fires,” he said.
“Where we look at survivability risk and maneuver risk … there’s, you know, an ability to how we actually fight from the sea. It’s got to be executed in practice. So that’s why this idea of tailored forces and tailored assets and tailored offsets to enable the general-purpose force like the battleship is so important, along with counter-targeting,” he added.
