From January 2027 a Democrat-controlled US Congress will be eager to reverse President Trump’s more outlandish defence plans and interventions as soon as they can, but reversing the United States’ overall defence and security strategy under Trump will take much longer.
With the Democrats set to take up a majority in both houses of the US Congress in January 2027 following their overwhelming victory in the November Mid-Term Elections, cancellations and reversals are on the cards for some of US President Donald Trump’s signature defence projects. Moreover, US defence and security strategy could start to shift, even while Trump serves out the final two years of his presidency.
Trump’s narcissism and inflated regard for his own capabilities – in any field, at any point – has not done the US military any favours. His second term as president, however, has had a particularly detrimental effect on both current and future US military capabilities; not only has he embroiled the US military in a war with Iran that, now approaching the nine-month stage, has failed strategically while wearing down US weapon stocks, but Trump’s meddling in defence programmes has, at the very least, wasted billions of dollars through the implementation of very bad ideas. And, as has been typical within the Trump Administration, no one stopped him from making those decisions.
The president’s most obviously ill-conceived idea was the Trump-class battleship, which resurrected a class of capital warship last operated by the US Navy (USN) in March 1992, when the last Iowa-class battleship, USS Missouri, was decommissioned (and there was, of course, a reason for the USN not ordering any more).
Trump first announced the plan to initially build “two brand-new, very large – largest we’ve ever built – battleships” from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach on 22 December 2025. These would be followed by eight more: the centrepiece of what Trump has termed the future ‘Golden Fleet’.
Trump’s apparent notion that ‘bigger is better’ with regard to capital warships came at a time when European navies were already looking to disaggregate their naval assets – for example by using manned ‘motherships’ in conjunction with multiple unmanned effector platforms – to make them more survivable and to take full advantage of autonomous technology. Instead of also following this doctrine, the USN was going back to putting all its eggs – including rail guns, laser weapons and all kinds of missiles and other weapons – in one missile magnet of a basket by creating a naval behemoth.
Somewhat nonsensically, Trump even claimed to have had design input into the new US battleship. During a speech to military families at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on 13 February 2026, Trump asserted, “The new battleship that we have, which I’ve seen and helped design, I put a little more spirit in the hull, a little bit more, give me a little bit more hull; I want that ship to look gorgeous.
“Forget about stealth. They say, ‘Oh, it’s stealth’. They design ugly equipment for stealth. Well, we’re designing great looking equipment, also stealth.”
When the battleships were first announced it was stated that they would have a full-load displacement of 35,000 tons (31,751 tonnes) or more, a length of 840 to 880 ft (256 to 268 m), and a sustained speed in excess of 30 knots (55.6 km/h), making them the largest surface combatants in the world and, indeed, larger than any surface combatant built for the USN since the Second World War. They would be more than three-and-a-half times the size of the USN’s Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer and more than twice the size of the navy’s Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyer.
Then, at the National Symposium of the Surface Navy Association the following month, it was announced that the Trump Battleship programme would ultimately include 15 ships over the next 30 years and potentially a total of 25 battleships in all.
Even while the cost and shipbuilding capacity issues regarding the Trump-class battleship programme were being raised, the situation got a whole lot worse on 11 May 2026 when, in announcing its annual 30-year shipbuilding plans, the USN declared that the new battleships would be nuclear powered, thus adding significantly to the programme’s up-front costs.
A US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on the Trump-class battleship programme, released on 5 August 2026, confirmed what numerous observers had predicted when Trump first announced it: that building a new battleship class would be excessively expensive and tie up US naval shipbuilding capacity for other more modestly sized, but more operationally useful, naval platforms.
The CBO estimated that, with the Trump-class battleships now to be nuclear powered, the programme would cost about USD 275 billion in 2026 dollars (EUR 238 billion) over the 2027–2056 period. The first ship would cost about USD 23.4 billion, with subsequent ships of the class averaging a cost of USD 18 billion, giving the total cost of around USD 275 billion for 15 battleships built between 2028 and 2056. This was about 13% more expensive than the CBO’s original estimates for the Trump-class battleships when they were to be conventionally powered, which it pegged at USD 21.3 billion for the lead ship and an average of USD 15.9 billion for the 14 follow-on ships in the class.
By comparison, when procured at a standard rate of two ships per year (as per the USN’s FY 2026 budget request), the cost of a Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer is around USD 2.7 billion (EUR 2.43 billion).
There can be little doubt that building the Trump-class battleship fleet would have a detrimental effect on other, already-delayed build programmes for US surface combatants, which include Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, America-class amphibious assault ships, San Antonio-class amphibious transport docks and US Coast Guard Offshore Patrol Cutters. While the Constellation-class frigate programme was curtailed in November 2025, the following month it was announced that the USN’s new small surface combatant, FF(X), would be built by the Ingalls Shipbuilding division of Huntington Ingalls Industries based on the latter’s Legend-class National Security Cutter design.
At any rate, the fact that the Trump-class battleships would be nuclear powered requires their final assembly to be conducted by Newport News Shipbuilding: the only US new-construction shipyard certified for work on nuclear-powered surface ships. This, then, would have a detrimental effect on the build programme for Gerald R Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, as well as the yard’s work on building Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines and Columbia-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (the construction of which is shared with General Dynamics Electric Boat).
On 23 December 2025 an article published by the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank prophetically asserted that Trump’s battleship “will never sail. It will take years to design, cost USD 9 billion each to build [that was even before the nuclear propulsion was announced], and contravene the navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower.
“A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water,” the CSIS stated.
Sure enough, the Trump-class battleship looks dead in the water.
Unfortunately, Trump’s plan for a new fleet of outlandish battleships named after himself – the only instance of a US capital warship to be named after a still-sitting president – was not the only intervention the US president made that directed USN shipbuilding plans down an expensive naval architecture cul-de-sac.
A ‘Memorandum for the Secretary of War’ issued by the White House on 13 August 2026, which otherwise focused on rebuilding the US naval shipbuilding industrial base, stated, “Within 60 days of the date of this memorandum, the Secretary of War, in consultation with the Secretary of the Navy, shall provide to the President, through the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), a plan on the required measures to replace the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System [EMALS] and Advanced Weapons Elevators [AWEs] with steam and hydraulic systems for the construction of CVN 81 [the future USS Doris Miller, the fourth Ford-class aircraft carrier], including timelines and resourcing requirements.”
Implementation of this directive would represent an astonishing reversal of technological progress for the USN, which first implemented EMALS, designed and manufactured by General Atomics, on the first-of-class carrier USS Gerald R Ford, which was commissioned – by President Trump himself during his first term – on 22 July 2017.
Moreover, the directive to change from EMALS to steam catapults from the fourth Ford-class carrier onwards directly flies in the face of another point contained in the memorandum, which directs that the USN “shall not impose iterative design changes upon … original mature parent designs”.
Ditching EMALS would also be an international embarrassment for the USN, given that China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy has implemented its own electromagnetic launch system on Fujian: its first indigenously designed aircraft carrier. Video imagery emerged of Fujian conducting dead-load launch testing of its three electromagnetic catapults on Chinese social media channel Weibo on 26 November 2023. Footage released by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV on 22 September 2025 showed multiple aircraft types conducting catapult-assisted take-off and arrested landing training on Fujian and the carrier was officially commissioned into active service on 5 November 2025.
It’s true that EMALS had an uneasy introduction. Along with numerous new technologies introduced on USS Gerald R Ford (CVN-78) and subsequent carriers of the class, EMALS suffered from development issues and contributed to significant delays to the Ford-class build programme, which is now years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. A few months before Gerald R Ford was commissioned, Trump railed against EMALS during an interview with Time magazine published on 11 May 2017, stating, “I realised they’re going to digital. I said, ‘No, digital is no good. It’s got to be goddamn steam.’”
As with all new technologies, the issues with EMALS as well as others, such as the Ford-class carriers’ Advanced Weapons Elevators and Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG), which replace the older hydraulic systems of the USN’s Nimitz-class carriers, are being worked through.
Compared with steam catapult technology, which was developed in the 1950s, EMALS is more efficient, smaller, lighter, more powerful, less manpower intensive and much easier to fine tune. The system can launch aircraft that are both heavier and lighter than those launchable by a steam catapult and, due to the way EMALS can be controlled, it puts less stress on the airframes that it launches. EMALS, moreover, is designed to deliver sortie rates that steam catapults could never match.
Apart from the USN throwing away those advantages if it ditched EMALS, any return to steam catapult technology will be extremely difficult and very costly. The last of the USN’s Nimitz-class carriers, USS George H W Bush, was launched in October 2006, meaning that no US company has manufactured steam catapults in 20 years.
Furthermore, the Ford class and its operational systems have been designed specifically to take advantage of the ship’s nuclear powerplant’s ability to generate much larger volumes of electrical energy than the Nimitz class, meaning that significant design alterations would be required to retrofit a steam catapult system, adding multiple tens of millions of dollars to the cost of the Ford-class carrier programme and delaying it by years.
Construction of Doris Miller began in August 2021 and the carrier was expected to be delivered to the USN in February 2034, according to the USN’s FY 2027 budget justification books: a delay of two years from the previously projected delivery date of February 2032. However, if the carrier were to be reconfigured for a new steam catapult system, the USN could certainly say goodbye to that revised delivery date.
If that were not enough, Trump has reportedly requested the entire ‘island’ superstructure of future Ford-class carriers further forward, according US media reports in August 2026: a design change that would cost several billion dollars on top of the Ford class’s unit price of at least USD 13 billion. The reason for this was reportedly simply because Trump doesn’t like the way the carriers look compared to Second World War-era designs.
As Warsight has reported, there are specific reasons why the Ford-class carrier’s superstructure is where it is. Moreover, as The National Interest reported on 18 August 2026, “moving the island could only be made beginning with CVN-82, the planned future USS William J. Clinton [the fifth Ford-class aircraft carrier]”.
The National Interest further reported, “A formal detail design and construction (DD&C) contract has to be awarded, and even once that happens, it will be years before construction on the aircraft carrier could begin. That won’t happen until at least the end of the decade, and so the new carrier wouldn’t enter service – if it is even built – until the middle to late 2030s. By that time, Trump would be out of office and in his 90s, if still living.”
Suffice to say that both the EMALS/AWE and superstructure redirections for future Ford-class carriers by Trump are very unlikely to be implemented by a Democrat-controlled Congress, but even pandering to them up until now has cost the USN both time and money.
At this point it is worth considering why senior USN leaders stood still for all of this and, clearly knowing better, said nothing – at least in public. A generous interpretation of that situation would be that, having seen their Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, dismissed by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on 21 February 2025 – one of many senior US military leaders who were casualties of Hegseth’s ‘War on Woke’ or otherwise dismissed for not obediently following the Trump Administration’s direction of travel – they simply chose to ‘go along to get along’ and preserve their positions. Perhaps they simply hoped that, at some point – whether through a ‘Blue Wave’ at the November Mid-Terms or otherwise – sense would finally prevail.
Unlike Trump’s patently unsound interventions into US naval architecture, his ‘Golden Dome for America’ plan, which was introduced via Executive Order 14186 on 27 January 2025, can at least claim to make strategic sense. Conceived as a multi-layer missile defence initiative intended to defend the entire United States, Golden Dome builds on existing US sensor and interceptor architectures – such as the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, Aegis ballistic missile defence system, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system and Patriot PAC-3 air defence system – while adding space-based sensors and interceptors.
Given the nascent threat from hypersonic weapons, which give ground-based air defences a very limited envelop in which to detect and react to them, the need to enhance the current US space-based early warning assets and ultimately base effectors in space – including capabilities such as laser weapons – would appear to be a requirement (although the extent to which such assets would be vulnerable to attack is the subject of ongoing debate).
However, White House projections with regard to cost and timeline are where Golden Dome starts to depart from reality. In May 2025 the Trump Administration estimated the system would cost USD 175 billion over roughly three years, with Congress initially providing USD 24.4 billion toward Golden Dome-related efforts through the FY2025 reconciliation law (commonly referred to as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act), which Trump referred to as an initial down payment or deposit toward the system. Furthermore, Trump maintained that the system “should be fully operational before the end of my term [on 20 January 2029]”.
In May 2026, however, the CBO estimated that Golden Dome would cost around USD 1.2 trillion to develop, deploy and operate for two decades – six times Trump’s price tag a year earlier – while by October 2026 new outlets such as National Defense were reporting that “little progress has been made on the system, with internal misalignment on the administration’s plans for the architecture causing delays”.
Golden Dome is very much Trump’s version of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, otherwise known as ‘Star Wars’) announced by Republican US President Ronald Reagan in March 1983: an effort that never came to fruition due to technical challenges and excessive costs, yet is credited by some for hastening the end of the Cold War.
As with the SDI effort, debate continues around the extent to which Golden Dome would truly provide an effective missile shield over the US homeland or would instead either destabilise the country’s nuclear posture with regard to Russia and China. Some observers warn that it could also exacerbate the already-accelerating arms race in space.
Ultimately, though, it is likely that Golden Dome’s cost will ultimately kill it. For FY 2026 the US national defence budget exceeded the USD 1 trillion threshold for the first time when standard annual appropriations were combined with mandatory funding enacted through budget reconciliation. Regarding the FY 2027 US defence budget a looming battle between Hegseth/Trump and Congress is imminent, given that Hegseth has asked lawmakers to provide the Pentagon with a record-breaking USD 1.5 trillion: a figure substantially higher than what Democrats are willing to countenance.
With Hegseth having narrowly avoiding a House impeachment vote on 10 November 2026 over his track record of the last two years, even his mere continued presence in the Pentagon is likely to be an obstacle to Congress agreeing a new defence budget once the House and Senate have Democrat majorities from January.
In that climate it is difficult to see how the Golden Dome initiative will be considered by Democrats as anything other than another Trump vanity project (it is called ‘Golden’, after all; everything with Trump has to be ‘Golden’, from the garishly gilted Oval Office to anything beyond).
It is therefore most likely that, just as with SDI, the Golden Dome effort will be broken down into separate, more modest R&D efforts that examine the art of the possible regarding total homeland missile defences rather than claiming to do ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’. By that point, under a Democrat-controlled Congress (and maybe in two years even under a Democrat president), it won’t be called Golden Dome.
Unlike the USN, the US Army and US Air Force (USAF) do not seem to have received major programme interference during Trump’s second term beyond him naming the air force’s future Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform the F-47 to reflect him being the 47th president (The USAF subsequently claimed the F-47 “honors the legacy of the P-47” Second World War fighter and “pays tribute to the founding year of the Air Force, while also recognizing the 47th President’s pivotal support for the development of the world’s first sixth-generation fighter”.)
That said, Trump’s insistence on using a Qatari-gifted Boeing 747-8 airliner as an interim Air Force One has led to USD 400 million being wasted on it for security, communications and other operational upgrades, none of which match the capabilities of the two VC-25As that alternately act as Air Force One, or especially the two VC-25Bs that will succeed them.
Beyond US military programmes, however, the second Trump Administration has had a profound effect on US foreign and security policy in ways that will takes years, rather than just a Democrat-dominated Congress, to reverse.
Every October the Association of the US Army (AUSA) convenes in Washington, DC, for its annual symposium. As well as visiting the several hundred international defence companies exhibiting their systems and solutions, AUSA symposium attendees also have access to high-level seminars addressing the US Army’s major issues, strategy and policy directions, presented by numerous senior US Army leaders and invited speakers.
From 2012, for example, senior army leadership expounded at the annual AUSA symposiums on the ‘Pivot to Asia’ strategy announced by President Barack Obama in November 2011. This author can remember those army leaders explaining that China’s growing military power in the Asia-Pacific needed to be countered and that, while that region is substantially a maritime domain comprising huge swathes of ocean, the US Army presence there was vital in bringing both military capability to check the ascendency of the Chinese armed forces and by engaging and exercising with the armies of US regional allies.
In October 2026, however, the AUSA symposium’s seminar agenda looked somewhat different. One of the key events was a seminar entitled ‘Land Power in the Western Hemisphere’, at which a key presenter was General Joseph Ryan, Commanding General of US Army Western Hemisphere Command.
The reason for the primacy of this subject stemmed directly from the Trump Administration’s latest National Security Strategy, published on 4 December 2025, which placed an overriding focus on the Western Hemisphere.
Along with largely ignoring the increasingly vital space domain, the 2025 National Security Strategy derided Europe, which it claimed to be in “economic decline” and facing the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure”, and asserted that the United States “will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”, referring to the US 19th Century foreign policy initiated by US President James Monroe in 1823 that opposed European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere and effectively claimed US jurisdiction over the Americas.
While the strategy stressed the importance of countering China economically, adding that this “must be accompanied by a robust and ongoing focus on deterrence to prevent war in the Indo-Pacific”, its shellacking of European allies, even as they sought to support Ukraine against a Russian invasion, and its preoccupation with the Western Hemisphere as a primary tenet was an unprecedented strategic US reset, focusing US foreign policy on a hemisphere that contained neither Russia nor China: the United States’ two peer-level 21st Century adversaries.
Indeed, the primary security threats facing the United States from the Western Hemisphere, most obviously narco-trafficking and illegal immigration from the US southern border, are not military threats but security challenges that require a multi-agency approach.
The most prominent US operation in the Western Hemisphere following the declaration of the Donroe Doctrine – Operation ‘Absolute Resolve’, which on 3 January 2026 led to the successful capture and rendition back to the United States of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to face charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking – was framed as a law-enforcement-led operation enabled and assisted by the US military. This also meant, of course, that it did not require Congressional approval in the way that an overt military operation would have done.
That is not to say that involvement of the US military force is not appropriate at times in the Western Hemisphere, an example of this being the US Army’s targeting of drug-cartel-controlled drones operating over the southern US border using laser weapons from August 2026.
Other US military operations in the Western Hemisphere, however, have been more controversial. The USN’s lethal attacks on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean at Hegseth’s direction from September 2025, which offered no opportunity for apprehension or surrender, have been called a war crime by some, including US lawmakers (this was cited among Republican Representative Thomas Massie’s ultimately unsuccessful impeachment articles against Hegseth in November 2026).
Meanwhile, pursuit of what would ultimately be called the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ began to cause major issues for the NATO alliance when – several months before the new US National Security Strategy was published and even before taking office in January 2025 – Trump renewed his first-term interest in taking control of the Danish autonomous territory of Greenland for ‘security reasons’.
On 17 January 2026, however, Trump went even further, announcing that he would impose 10% tariffs from 1 February on goods from Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom if they did not comply with his plans to take control of Greenland. Those tariffs, Trump said, would increase to 25% if an agreement was not reached by 1 June.
In the face of this NATO’s European allies stood their ground, condemning the move (especially given the basing rights in Greenland that the US already possessed), while even Republican lawmakers declared Trump’s avarice over Greenland “appalling” and “absurd”. Nevertheless, this was another occasion where politicians in Europe as well as the United States began to hope for a Blue Wave in the US November 2026 Mid-Terms.
At AUSA 2026, following the ‘Land Power in the Western Hemisphere’ seminar, Warsight approached Gen Ryan and asked “What happened to the ‘Pivot to Asia’?”
The general replied, “The National Security Strategy, if you read it, defines the priority: geographic areas – the Western Hemisphere in terms of defence of the homeland – but also defines the pacing threat as the People’s Republic of China [PRC]. The PRC is a global threat: economically it’s a global threat; it’s a global threat in Central and South America because of the way they’ve expanded, not with forces but economically and with some military capabilities as well. So I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to say we would use the tools at our disposal in the Western Hemisphere to combat the same threat for which we take a different approach in that region of the world … but those decisions are not up to me; those decisions are made at the [Office of the Secretary of War] administration.”
Nevertheless, it’s worth wondering, if China really is the pacing threat, what the Donroe Doctrine is really doing in addressing it, as opposed to creating a political distraction from the long-term strategic perspective.
Moreover, while the relations of US military leaders inside NATO with their European counterparts will have endured regardless of how the political wind is blowing from Washington, DC, there is no doubt that serious transatlantic harm has been done by the Trump Administration over the last two years.
