Trump-class battleships should not be built until weapons technology is ready, lawmakers say

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Congressional Republicans and Democrats included a short provision in proposed defense legislation on Tuesday that provides more clarification on what is needed for the construction of Trump-class battleships.

Lawmakers in the House Armed Services Committee announced their $1.15 trillion fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, stipulating that the new battleship built in the president’s name will not begin construction until the munitions packages onboard are sound enough to deploy.

The NDAA provides a foundational sum of money for the Trump administration’s proposed $1.5 trillion fiscal 2027 Defense Department budget.

“The Secretary of the Navy may not enter into a contract or other agreement that includes a scope of work for the construction of the lead ship of the battleship program until the date on which the secretary certifies to the congressional defense committees that the weapon systems planned for inclusion in such lead ship are at a sufficiently mature technology readiness level,” the document says.

The battleship will include a bevy of complex weapons systems, including hypersonic missiles, electromagnetic railguns and high-powered lasers, President Donald Trump announced in December 2025.

The Navy’s hypersonic missile program is currently in its testing phase, as the service intends to field the weapon across sea-based platforms in the future.

The service successfully launched a common hypersonic missile, which can top Mach 5 speeds, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on March 26, in coordination with the U.S. Army.

Navy officials said in 2024 that the service planned to begin testing the Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missile system aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Zumwalt in 2027 or 2028.

Construction on the first $17 billion Trump-class battleship is slated to begin in 2028, with delivery scheduled for the 2030s, according to Navy budget estimates.

US Navy leaders embrace Trump-class battleships

The service previously invested roughly $500 million in its electromagnetic railgun program, which began in 2005, but after failing to field the weapon, the Navy announced in 2021 that it was pausing the program and diverting attention and resources toward the development of hypersonic missile systems.

Electromagnetic railguns expend munitions through the use of magnetic fields, as opposed to gunpowder, and fire guns seven times the speed of sound to conduct strikes up to around 100 nautical miles away.

Despite the high hopes for the gun, the weapons systems encountered numerous problems during testing, most notably an inability to fire a high number of rounds without the need for maintenance.

The barrel on the railgun used during trials needed to be replaced after firing between a dozen and two dozen shots, whereas a regular gun can fire 600 times before needing the same intervention.

The Navy’s fixation on incorporating laser weapons systems into a bulk of its fleet has also bled over into the design for the Trump-class battleships, but the timeline for when those systems can be properly fielded also remains a mystery.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle told lawmakers at a May 14 House Armed Services Committee hearing that high-energy laser weapons were an integral part of the service’s future fleet.

But he conceded that watching the system come to fruition depended on the service’s funding of research and development for building “compact, high-density energy storage and thermal management systems capable of handling the demands of [directed energy weapons].”

The Navy currently hosts solid state lasers on nine guided-missile destroyers, including the Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy, and the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance.