CBO Prices the Navy's Battleship Programme at $275 Billion for 15 Ships, With the Lead Ship at $23 Billion

CBO estimates the Navy’s planned nuclear-powered battleships would cost about $275 billion in 2026 dollars for 15 ships bought between 2028 and 2056. Its report, published on 5 August, puts the lead ship at $23.4 billion and the rest at about $18 billion each.

The Navy’s own budget put the lead ship at $15.1 billion. That figure was for a conventionally powered ship, and the Navy has since chosen nuclear propulsion. The gap between the two numbers is the first thing Congress will have to settle before it pays for the ship.

From announcement to plan

President Trump and Navy Secretary John Phelan announced the battleship on 22 December 2025 as the centrepiece of what they called the Golden Fleet. The lead ship is to be named Defiant. The Navy posted notices of two design contracts the same day, each with a six-year performance period.

The fiscal 2027 budget, released in April, asked for $65.8 billion for shipbuilding, the largest request since 1962. For the battleship it sought about $1 billion in advance procurement and $837 million in research and development. The Navy’s plan is to buy the first ship in fiscal 2028, then one in 2030 and one in 2031, then one every other year. Its five-year budget projected $43.5 billion in battleship procurement. In May the Navy released its 30-year shipbuilding plan for fiscal 2027, which ends the DDG(X) destroyer programme and keeps building DDG-51 destroyers, two in most years.

CBO describes a ship of about 35,000 tons fully loaded, with 128 vertical launch cells, four tubes for 12 Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles, a rail gun, two high-powered lasers, two five-inch guns and a crew of 650 to 850. The Navy has said the class could grow to 25 ships.

Why CBO’s number is higher

Lead ships cost more because they carry the design work for the class. CBO puts it bluntly: lead ships “almost always experience substantial cost growth.” Its estimate for a conventionally powered battleship of the same size is $21.3 billion for the first and $15.9 billion on average for the rest, or $243 billion for 15. Nuclear power adds about 13%. CBO couldn’t estimate how much the Navy would save on fuel over the ships’ lives.

Size drives the range. At 30,000 tons the estimate would fall by about 13%. At 41,000 tons, the top of the range the Navy has given, the lead ship would cost about 16% more.

CBO’s earlier figures, cited by CRS in January, were lower: $17.6 billion to $18.9 billion for a first ship bought in 2030, in 2025 dollars, for a conventional design. The nuclear decision and a 2028 start explain most of the change. For scale, a DDG-51 costs about $2.7 billion, and the Navy’s own estimate for the carrier CVN-81 is about $15.2 billion.

The shipyard problem

Money is only part of it. CBO compared the 2027 plan with the 2025 plan. Large surface combatants rise from 51 ships to 72: 15 battleships plus 57 DDG-51s, replacing 23 DDG-51s and 28 DDG(X)s. Average annual funding for large surface combatants roughly doubles, from about $7 billion to $15 billion, and for all surface combatants it rises from about $11 billion to $19 billion. By 2035 shipyards would have to turn out more than twice the tonnage of large warships they would have under the earlier plan.

Senior Navy leaders have told Congress that Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia would do the final assembly, in its Dock 12. It’s the only new-construction yard certified for nuclear surface ship work. It’s also behind on three aircraft carriers and many submarines. Bath Iron Works and Ingalls are helping with the design and could build sections, but neither is certified for nuclear work.

Existing programmes show the strain. DDG-51s that Congress has already funded are running about five years late. The average time from appropriation to delivery has grown to 11 years, from five in 2000 to 2009. CBO’s testimony to two House subcommittees on 22 April said that with historical build times the fleet would already have more than 300 ships. The record of the cancelled Constellation frigate and the late Columbia submarine is in our post on acquisition reform.

What CBO doubts

CBO assumes an eight-year build and questions whether construction can start in 2028. The DDG(X) was also once planned for a 2028 buy, and in its last budget the Navy still had no formal acquisition strategy for it. CRS has raised other questions for Congress: what alternatives the Navy studied before choosing the design, whether concentrating firepower in fewer hulls fits its own doctrine of spreading sensors and weapons across many ships, and whether the rail gun and lasers will be mature in time.

None of the money has been appropriated. Fiscal 2027 starts on 1 October under the stopgap signed on 2 September, which bars new programmes, and the defence authorisation bill hasn’t passed the Senate. The battleship’s first real test is whether Congress funds its advance procurement at all.