Key Points and Summary – At Quantico, President Trump mixed tough talk with a throwback idea: bring back battleships. He praised Iowa-class icons and dismissed today’s “ugly stealth” designs, hinting tariffs could bankroll new steel leviathans.
-It’s a romantic vision of sea power—big guns, thick armor, “nothing was gonna stop them”—but it collides with the modern fight, where missiles, drones, subs, and networks decide who lives and who sinks.
-Navy historians note you could museum-to-pier a ship like New Jersey in weeks “to service,” but real combat readiness would demand parts, powder, crews, and billions—plus a mission they can actually survive.
-If battleships ever return, they’d be unrecognizable: sensor-soaked arsenal ships or shore-pounding monitors, surviving by not getting hit at all. Nostalgia makes great TV; deterrence demands math.
The Great Battleship Comeback of 2025?
U.S. President Donald Trump talked about a lot of things during his 70-minute speech to generals, admirals, and other military personnel in Quantico on Tuesday.
In comments to reporters before the speech, he threatened to fire generals “on the spot.” He talked about bringing troops into more U.S. cities. He agreed with Hegseth’s call for a return to the “warrior spirit,” and mused on various favorite topics of his, including tariffs and his often-stated desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
“If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room, of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future,” Trump said at Quantico.
A New Battleship Era?
However, during one section of the speech, Trump discussed a surprising subject: his desire to revive Navy battleships, a type that has been out of service for more than 30 years. The USS Missouri, the last active American Navy battleship, was decommissioned in 1992 and became a museum ship six years later, one of eight around the country. The last time new ones were built was around the time of World War II, about 80 years ago.
USS New Jersey July 2025. Image Credit: National Security Journal.
Trump, in the speech, hinted at a battleship comeback.
“It’s something we’re actually considering,” Trump said, as cited by Business Insider.”The concept of battleship, nice six-inch side, solid steel, not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. Starts melting as the missile is about two miles away. No, those ships, they don’t make them that way anymore.”
Trump referred to the USS Iowa as an ideal, and cited the early 1950s TV documentary series “Victory at Sea,” which extolled American Naval power during World War II.
However, it appears he would prefer to build new ships, rather than bring old ones back into service. Trump said that the billions of dollars that have come in from tariffs are “enough to buy a lot of battleships.”
The Great Navy Battleship Comeback?
Back during his first presidential campaign in September of 2015, Trump had delivered a speech on board the USS Iowa itself, during which he floated the idea of recommissioning the ship, although he never followed through on doing so during his first presidency. Almost exactly a decade later, Trump has now revisited the idea of a battleship comeback.
“I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them, and man, nothing was gonna stop them,” Trump added in the Tuesday speech in Quantico. “Some people would say, ‘No, that’s old technology,’ I don’t know, I don’t think it’s old technology when you look at those guns.”
Indeed, Trump’s argument is largely aesthetic, and seemingly more about his belief that the ships look cool than any military utility.
“I am a very aesthetic person. I don’t like some of the ships you’re doing aesthetically,” Trump said. “They say, ‘Oh, it’s stealth.’ That’s not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you’re stealth.”
Why It Likely Will Never Happen
Battleships, however, became obsolete for a reason, as pointed out by Business Insider. For one thing, the countries the U.S. would be fighting in future wars don’t have them. For another, battleships are less than well-suited for modern combat.
For example, China has had for over a decade long-range, anti-ship missiles that could attack Navy warships from over 2,500 miles away. And Beijing is manufacturing such weapons, like the DF-26 ASBM, in large numbers.
Long View of USS Iowa Guns. Image Credit: National Security Journal.
It’s not clear how serious Trump is about a battleship comeback. However, should one take place, building such ships would likely cost a significant amount of money and take a considerable amount of time.
The Case For More Battleships?
Trump, however, is not the first to suggest a return of battleships. Robert Farley, also a contributor to National Security Journal, back in 2015, wrote for The National Interest about the history of the idea of reviving them, in a piece that was republished in 2024.
According to the piece, various countries, including the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union/Russia, have flirted with the idea of reviving the battleship in the years since World War II.
“The problem is that passive systems need to protect a ship from a wide range of different attacks, including cruise missiles, torpedoes, ballistic missiles, and long-range guns. Keeping a ship well-protected from these threats, all of which it could anticipate facing in an anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) situation, would likely prove cost-prohibitive,” Farley wrote at the time.
“The ‘battleship’ could return, although it will play a role more like a classic monitor (intended to fight against shore-based systems) than a line-of-battle-ship. And these new ‘battleships’ will survive less because of their ability to absorb hits, than to avoid hits altogether.”
Return of the Battleship USS New Jersey?
In an interview this summer with National Security Journal, the CEO of the Battleship New Jersey museum, Marshall Spivak, said that as part of the museum’s contract with the Navy, they reserve the right to call the Iowa-class battleship back into service, should such a thing be required by a national emergency.
However, such a reactivation ever happening is highly unlikely.
“We have no feeling that that will ever happen again,” Spivak said, adding that a massive refurbishment that the ship recently underwent was not performed with an eye towards the battleship returning to service.
National Security Journal Visits a Battleship and Finds It in ‘Poor Condition’
Also, Harry J. Kazianis, our own Editor-In-Chief, visited the USS Iowa back in August and discovered the ship in “poor condition” and, in his words, “[W]ould take billions of dollars to get into anything like sea-worthy shape and would be a complete waste of time when you consider what modern naval assets you could get for that money.”
Image from the deck of USS Iowa taken by Harry J. Kazianis back in August 2025. National Security Journal Image. All Rights Reserved.
Maybe a Comeback Is Possible?
A Popular Mechanics report, published in 2024, quoted an official naval historian as stating that it would only take 60 days to bring the Battleship New Jersey back to service, although “to service” is something of a relative term.
“The battleships were modernized in the early 1980s, and some of the equipment—including the AN/SPS-49 air search radar—is still used today,” the report said, of the Iowa-class battleships.
“Other issues, however—including a non-working fuel system, a lack of gunpowder and explosive charges for shells, and a near complete lack of spare parts—would prove challenging obstacles to overcome.”
If battleships ever did return, they likely wouldn’t look like, or function like, their predecessors from World War II.
“The most likely scenario for a comeback would be one in which the U.S. military had to launch a major amphibious assault against a heavily defended objective—for example, if a major NATO or Asian ally had suffered a catastrophic loss,” Popular Mechanics said.
“A Taiwan that had been overrun by a Chinese invasion force, or a North Korea that had once again (like the early days of the Korean War) pushed South Korea into a tiny section of the Korean peninsula.”
About the Author: Stephen Silver
Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, national security, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.
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Brent Leatherman
October 3, 2025 at 1:39 am
How someone can be that mud stupid and still remember to breathe is beyond me.