The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Navy’s planned fleet of 15 nuclear-powered guided missile battleships will cost $275 billion in 2026 dollars between 2027 and 2056, a figure that would push annual spending on large surface combatants from roughly $11 billion to about $19 billion and demand a shipbuilding capacity the United States has not demonstrated in decades. The program’s lead ship is priced at $23.4 billion with follow-on vessels averaging $18 billion each, making them among the most expensive warships ever ordered.
The numbers are the story
The Navy’s earlier projection for a conventionally powered version put the lead ship at $15.1 billion and follow-ons at $10.2 billion on average. The shift to nuclear propulsion in the 2027 “Golden Fleet” plan added more than $8 billion to the first hull and nearly $8 billion to each subsequent one. At 35,000 tons full-load displacement, each battleship would be more than three times the size of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and carry vertical launch cells, hypersonic missiles, high-powered lasers, a rail gun, and nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles. CBO notes the ships could offer lower operating costs by eliminating conventional fuel, though it says there is insufficient information to estimate those savings.
The shipyard bottleneck
By 2035, shipbuilders would need to more than double the annual tonnage of large surface combatants under construction compared with the previous plan, even as work on smaller surface combatants declines by roughly 40 percent. Overall production of large surface combatants would rise about 60 percent. Newport News Shipbuilding, the only yard certified to build nuclear-powered surface ships, would perform final assembly while already building Ford-class aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. Destroyers now take an average of 11 years from funding to delivery, compared with about five years during the 2000s, and carrier and submarine construction also remains behind schedule.
Design maturity is the wildcard
The Navy aims to order the lead ship in 2028, but the battleship remains in the early stages of design. CBO cautions that beginning construction before the design is sufficiently mature, a recurring issue in recent Navy programs, could lead to additional cost growth and delays. The service argues that digital engineering, modular construction, and artificial intelligence-enabled design tools could reduce schedule risk, though CBO points to the Constellation-class frigate program as evidence that significant execution challenges remain.
What to watch
The $275 billion figure is a baseline, not a ceiling. If the shipyard workload forces further schedule slips, the cost will rise. The next inflection point is the 2028 lead-ship order: whether the Navy proceeds with an immature design or delays and absorbs the political cost of a slipped timeline.