This month, the US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report estimating that the US Navy’s proposed Trump-class nuclear-powered guided missile battleship program will cost roughly US$275 billion in 2026 dollars to build 15 ships between 2028 and 2056, averaging over $18 billion per hull. The key question, then, is whether the Trump-class battleship’s concentration of firepower, survivability and operational independence can justify its extraordinary cost, industrial burden and vulnerability in an era of distributed, networked and increasingly asymmetric naval warfare.