Not Your Grandfather’s Battleship: The Trump-Class Is Built for Hypersonic Strike and Drone War
Surface-fired hypersonic missiles, 600kw lasers, high-velocity rounds, and a 32 Megajoule Railgun are a few of the weapons systems expected arm the Trump-class Battleships.
Iowa-Class Battleship. Image Credit: Harry J. Kazianis, 19FortyFive.com
This new class of warships is intended to blend battleship firepower with destroyer-like weapons and a carrier and amphibious-like ability to launch helicopters and possibly even some fixed-wing aircraft.
Lasers, Railguns, Hypersonics
Early conceptual renderings of the Trump-class were displayed at the recent Surface Navy Association Symposium, where senior Navy leaders and weapons developers detailed planned weapons, concepts, and technologies for the warships.
The emerging consensus involves a much more modern blending of attributes, including innovations planned for the service’s DDG(X) next-generation destroyer program. The Trump-class will be armed with 128 Mk-41 Vertical Launch Systems, capable of firing SM-3s, SM-6s, and Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The ships will be large, second only in length to aircraft carriers, in part because senior planners wanted to ensure the warships can be armed with a full range of weapons, including VLS, deck-mounted guns, hypersonics, lasers, and railguns.
Battleship USS Iowa Logo 19FortyFive Image.
The thinking with the Trump-class is far more complex and nuanced than a simple effort to revive WWII-era Battleships; Navy leaders recently clarified something that could easily have been misunderstood, which is that while the emerging Trump-class warships may be called “Battleships,” they are intended to serve as modern, extremely high-tech, lethal warships with next-generation weapons, layered ship defenses and advanced command and control technologies.
While they may reintroduce classic levels of WWII firepower, the Trump-class will be armed with hypersonic missiles, lasers, and railguns.
Its guns will likely operate with an ability to blanket targets with rounds as an area weapon, yet also fire modern, precision-guided rounds with greater range, lethality, and guidance technology.
Given the size of the ships, they will undoubtedly be engineered with advanced layered ship defenses, including interceptor missiles, electronic warfare (EW), laser defenses, submarine-tracking sonar, and closer-in defenses such as the Rolling Airframe Missile, SeaRAM, and Close-in-Weapons System.
Trump-Class Battleship. Image Credit: Creative Commons/White House.
Trump-Class Battleship. Image Credit: Creative Commons/White House Photo.
Modern Guns
WWII-era guns, 5-inch guns built onto destroyers, were “dumb” rounds capable of unleashing massive amounts of ship-to-shore bombardment, and while “mass” fires will likely be possible with the Trump-class, the ships will undoubtedly be armed with new generations of “precision-guided” weaponry designed for long-range, highly targeted strikes.
Networked sensors, multi-domain datalinks, course-correcting guidance technologies, and joint interoperability will likely enable the weapons integrated into the Trump-class warships.
Firing precision rounds from deck-mounted 5-inch guns has been on the Navy’s radar for years, as innovations now enable classic weapons to achieve three times the range and deliver paradigm-changing levels of precision.
Not a WWII Battleship
This point was clearly articulated recently at the Navy’s Surface Navy Association Symposium, where senior Navy weapons developers made critical distinctions between the antiquated concepts of a WWII battleship and the intent for a new generation of warships.
Rear. Adm. Derek Trinque, the US Navy Director of Surface Warfare, stated that the planned technologies, weapons, and concepts of operation for the Trump-class are entirely different from what was considered the operational scope of classic WWII battleships.
“Battleships are obsolete. This is not us blowing the dust off the design of the Montana-class, which was to be a successor to the Iowa-class at the end of World War 2, and then we won World War 2, we didn’t need the Montana-class. Indeed, we don’t need that class. This is a ship we do need,” Trinque said at SNA, as cited in Naval News
The Trump-class could grow to 15 to 25 ships, depending on how far the US shipbuilding industrial base can “flex” to accommodate demand.
About the Author: Kris Osborn
Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a highly qualified expert in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.