Trump Green-Lights U.S. Navy's "Golden Fleet"

Destroyer USS Mason in the Red Sea during the counter-Houthi maritime security operation, a highly-demanding air defense mission (USN) — Destroyer USS Mason in the Red Sea during the counter-Houthi maritime security operation, a demanding air defense mission (USN)

President Donald Trump has green-lighted a plan to build a new "Golden Fleet" for the U.S. Navy, service secretary John Phelan told Axios at the Reagan National Defense Forum last week - and the ingredients will include a new frigate to replace the Constellation-class.

Phelan said that he met with Trump last week to get approval for the plan. In a social media message over the weekend, Phelan detailed out its components. In addition to the existing roster of destroyer, amphib and submarine contracts, the Navy plans to pull in "new, non-traditional partners into the American shipbuilding ecosystem." These partners will design and construct new classes of unmanned vessels "to bring options to the fight." One of the participants will be Saronic, the vertically-integrated USV manufacturer with a shipyard in Louisiana.

The service has also secured approval to make a "generational" investment in auxiliaries, including tankers, oilers and logistics ships. The vessels are sorely needed, but the economic activity from their construction will also help revive America's shipbuilding industry, Phelan said.

The list also includes "a new frigate, based on an American design . . . and built on a timeline faster than the program we canceled," he said. The service recently terminated contracts for future hulls in the long-delayed Constellation-class frigate program, clearing space to build other projects. The new frigate will be designed in America, and will have "flexible capability tailored to requirements from our warfighters," reminiscent of the flexible mission packages of the Littoral Combat Ship program.

He aded that Trump has also talked about "one more kind of big, beautiful ship," possibly referring to a proposal for a heavily-armed cruiser. According to the Wall Street Journal, talks inside the administration have centered on a combatant in the range of 15-20,000 tonnes displacement, or about twice the size of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. The extra space could be used to carry longer-range weapons like the Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS), the hypersonic missile system designed to offset recent Chinese and Russian weapons classes. CPS requires a larger storage and launch cell than Standard-series missiles do, so the extra capacity for space and weight would provide more room for this firepower. The concept of operations for this "Big, Beautiful Ship" would be to pair it with well-armed unmanned vessels, which would follow along and increase its available firepower.