US President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he will allocate $26 billion (approximately €22.1 billion) to the construction of warships, including three aircraft carriers and two new types of large warships.
“It is a great honor as Commander-in-Chief to announce that I have approved a plan for the Navy to begin building two new very large warships (…). They are going to be the fastest, the largest, and by far a hundred times more powerful than any warship ever built,” Trump said at a press conference in Palm Beach, Florida.
These “state-of-the-art” ships will be “the most lethal surface ships.” “These ships will be the first of a new class of warships that will be produced in the coming years,” Trump added.
The ships will be designed with artificial intelligence capabilities, a feature that will be “a fundamental factor,” and with “laser weapons, the most modern in the world,” according to Trump, who emphasized that these new vessels must be built quickly. He announced that he will meet next week with defense contractors in Florida to discuss how to accelerate the production schedule “because we are too slow.”
“They are not producing them fast enough,” he insisted, before warning that there will be penalties for companies that “are not doing a good job.”
The plan also includes improvements to shipyards and the construction of three new aircraft carriers, currently the key component of US fleets, as well as destroyers and at least twelve submarines.
Trump highlighted the value of this initiative because it will also create jobs in the United States and recalled that during World War II, the United States had the capacity to build four ships a day. “It’s a tragedy,” he lamented.
The US president appeared alongside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan. Phelan himself had announced the Trump administration’s intention to build a “Golden Fleet.” “We are going to invest in the cornerstone of U.S. naval power—aircraft carriers, destroyers, amphibious ships, and submarines—but we also need new ships,” Phelan said on December 7. Specifically, he mentioned a “new frigate with an American design and flexible capabilities tailored to the needs of our warfighters.”
