Trump's battleships

The Hill -   President Trump’s new class of battleships, which are envisioned to anchor the U.S. Navy’s “Golden Fleet,” are expected to cost around $275 billion to build, according to a government report released Wednesday. The first of 15 ships, the USS Defiant, is projected to cost around $23.4 billion to construct, with each subsequent vessel costing about $18 billion, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis said. The first battleship could take eight years or longer to construct.

The new class of battleships, which Trump unveiled in December, was initially set to be powered by gas turbine engines, which are on cruisers and destroyers. Later, the president said the vessels would be propelled with nuclear reactors. “They’ll be the fastest, the biggest and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump said in December, adding that the vessels would weigh more than 30,000 tons.

….The president aimed for the new ships to be built by 2028, a timeline that industry experts said would be unlikely.  “It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower,” Mark Cancian, the senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Defense and Security Department, wrote in late December. “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”

Trump fired his Navy secretary, John Phelan, in April in part over not making enough progress in constructing the battleships.