A $20B battleship the U.S. abandoned after WWII is back in Trump’s $1.5T defense budget. Experts say modern missiles will easily destroy it

President Donald Trump last month announced a record-setting $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal year 2027. But in that towering proposal, experts say there’s obvious signs of waste and overspend.

A recent Cato Institute report identified several weapons in next year’s defense budget request that the think tank deems unnecessary and ineffective. Among them is a battleship Trump announced in December, which the president named after himself. But the ship, in this case, the “Trump-class” battleship is what the Cato Institute considers to be technology so obsolete, as it’s from a time before the states of Alaska and Hawaii even existed.

Here’s the issue: the U.S. Navy hasn’t operated a battleship since the last Iowa-class vessel was retired in 1992, a type of vessel which hasn’t even been constructed since the mid-20th century. The Trump-class battleship, which the Department of Defense is requesting upwards of $1 billion to build, will inherently be stuck in WWII, and would be rendered helpless against modern-day weapons. In fact, despite the billion-dollar price tag, Cato puts the true cost at $20 billion apiece, and it still won’t be able to subvert modern-day, advanced anti-ship missiles.

“We haven’t........

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