Trump battleship plan poses new risk to AUKUS, committee fears

Donald Trump's planned "Golden Fleet" of battleships will put more strain on the US Navy's shipbuilding program and could further delay the submarines needed for AUKUS, according to a committee of Congress.

The House Armed Services Committee wants the US Navy to provide reassurances that building the "Trump-class" battleships will not delay other nuclear-powered boats.

The US's submarine-building program is already plagued by construction delays, which pose a threat to Australia's hopes of buying at least three Virginia-class submarines under the AUKUS pact.

Committee members fear the Navy's new plan to build at least 15 Trump-class battleships — also known as BBG(X) — will cause further delays in America's shipyards.

"The committee is concerned about the possibility of strain on US nuclear shipyards and maritime industrial base posed by the aggressive schedule proposed for producing a nuclear powered BBG(X) platform," an amendment to a defence budget bill, passed by the committee this week, says.

The amendment was moved by Democrat Joe Courtney, one of Congress's key AUKUS champions.

The amendment requests the Navy provide a report on its "strategy to design and construct BBG(X) without interfering with existing nuclear-powered shipbuilding plans".

Nuclear production pressure

Mr Trump announced plans for the so-called Golden Fleet of battleships in December. He said the "Trump-class" ships would be "the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built".

Democrats on the committee unsuccessfully tried to strike out funding for the battleship plan, which Mr Courtney said would "encroach on previous industrial base capacity" and "violates every lesson we've learned on shipbuilding".

"The program has gone from an AI-generated poster board in Mar-A-Lago in December to an expensive, premature acquisition of steel for a ship that still does not have a design yet,"

he said.

Last month, navy documents revealed the Trump-class battleships would be nuclear-powered.

This could further complicate production of nuclear-powered submarines, because the US Navy uses a single supplier of nuclear reactors for all its boats.

"The committee notes that the procurement of naval nuclear reactors typically occurs 2-to-3 years ahead of procurement of a respective vessel and reactor production timelines typically range from 6-to-8 years," the committee's amendment says.

"The committee is concerned that the accelerated procurement timeline for the BBG(X) program will result in a negative impact on this supply chain."

Plan for 15 battleships

The US Navy's latest shipbuilding roadmap, released last month, lays out plans to acquire 15 Trump-class battleships by 2055. The first, to be named "Defiant", would be delivered in 2036.

House Armed Services Committee members primarily expressed concern with the possible impact on surface-vessels, including nuclear-powered Gerald R Ford-class aircraft carriers, rather than submarines.

But they also want the Navy to explain how it would avoid delaying Virginia-class submarines, as well as its larger Columbia-class submarines.

In their legislative amendment, the committee requests the Navy produce a report by next March, including:

"An assessment of the capacity of existing US shipyards, certified for nuclear-powered vessel construction, to support construction of a nuclear-powered BBG(X) without delaying scheduled construction of projected and under-contract vessels within the Virginia-class, Columbia-class, and Gerald R. Ford-class programs.

"An assessment of the capacity of the US naval nuclear reactor industrial base capacity to support the construction of a nuclear-powered BBG(X) without delaying scheduled construction of projected and under-contract vessels within the Virginia-class, Columbia-class, and Gerald R. Ford-class programs."

A US official said the Navy "continuously assesses our industrial base capacity, including our nuclear shipbuilding industrial base, which is a top priority".

"As a matter of standard practice, we will provide this assessment as requested by Congress," the Navy official told the ABC.

The Navy's nuclear reactor supplier, BWXT Technologies, referred the ABC's queries to the Navy.

'Desperate need of ships'

AUKUS has weathered one of its most controversial weeks since its conception, after it was confirmed Australia would receive three used Virginia-class submarines from the US, rather than two used and one new.

But the transfer of US submarines — whether new or used — will require a substantial increase in the pace of construction at American shipyards.

To deliver on AUKUS, the US Navy is trying to lift the pace of construction to 2.33 submarines per year.

But the most recent official data showed the construction rate in 2024 was 1.15 boats per year. The goal for that year was a rate of 1.5 boats.

Research presented to Congress in April said the construction rate had fallen even further. The Congressional Budget Office research put the rate for the past two years at an average of 1.1 submarines per year.

Mr Trump has said his Golden Fleet plan is necessary to deal with the US Navy's "desperate need of ships".

"Some of them have gotten old and tired and obsolete, and we're going to go in the exact opposite direction," he said when announcing the plan in December.

Some experts see it as an unrealistic vanity project unlikely to survive beyond Mr Trump's term.

The battleships "will take years to design, cost $9 billion [$AU13 billion] each to build, and contravene the Navy's new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower," defence expert Mark Cancian, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote soon after the announcement.

"A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water."