The Trump-class battleship faces a large obstacle in its way: Reality

On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled plans for a new “Trump-class” battleship, declaring it would be “the fastest, the biggest, and by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.”

He hailed the ships as “some of the most lethal surface warfare ships,” promising they would “help maintain American military supremacy [and] inspire fear in America’s enemies all over the world.”

But there is one glaring problem: battleships have been obsolete for decades. The last was built more than 80 years ago, and the U.S. Navy retired the last Iowa-class ships nearly 30 years ago.

Once symbols of naval might with their massive guns, battleships have long since been eclipsed by aircraft carriers and modern destroyers armed with long-range missiles.

While labeling the new surface combatants as “battleships” could be a misnomer, defense experts say that there remain several gaps between Trump’s vision and modern naval warfare.

Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, dismissed the idea, writing in a Dec. 23 commentary that “there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail.”

He argued the program would take too long to design, cost far too much, and run counter to the Navy’s current strategy of distributed firepower.

“A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water,” Cancian said.

Bernard Loo, senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, described the proposal as “a prestige project more than anything else.”

He compared it to Japan’s World War II super-battleships Yamato and Musashi — the largest ever built — which were sunk by carrier-borne aircraft before playing a significant role in combat.

“Historically, we looked at battleships and the bigger the better… [and] in a very layman’s perspective of strategy, size matters,” Loo said.

He added that the size of the proposed battleship — displacing more than 35,000 tons and measuring over 840 feet, or a little over two football fields long — would make it a “bomb magnet.”

“The size and the prestige value of it all make it an even more tempting target, potentially for your adversary,” Loo said.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, suggested Trump may be drawn to the symbolic power of battleships, which were the most visible icons of naval firepower for much of the 20th century.

The USS Missouri, completed in 1944 and…