WATCH: Trump’s ‘Golden Fleet’ vision leaves Navy officials and shipbuilders guessing

Washington Times Defense and National Security Correspondent John T. Seward reports from the 38th National Symposium for the Surface Navy Association.

I’m here at the Surface Navy Symposium in Arlington, Virginia, and everyone’s talking about President Trump’s ’Golden Fleet,’ both in international headlines as well as among the defense industry, but there’s an issue. 

Navy officials and shipbuilding executives here are saying the same thing. Nobody actually knows what that means yet. 

There’s a lot of uncertainty about Trump’s rhetoric, translating into actual ships, actual budgets, actual timelines. 

But there’s also urgency here and optimism. The sense is that defense spending on ships is going to increase as long as Trump is in office. 

That’s creating momentum for some major shifts in how the Navy buys weapons. 

U.S. allies are pushing hard to revolutionize the acquisition process, especially for autonomous systems. 

Everyone here has their own version of an autonomous system. 

During a panel on Tuesday, military officials from the U.K., Australia, and Sweden stressed that they don’t want to wait for decades for one-off weapons systems where the governments are fronting all of the developmental cash, similar to the United States. 

Instead, they’re talking about co-funded prototypes that can deploy in months, not years. 

That’s the same approach that the Trump administration is pushing for at the Pentagon, accelerate purchasing and get capabilities to the fleet faster. 

That’s where this Trump-class battleship is coming in. 

Rear Admiral Derek Trinque, the Navy’s director of surface warfare, said Tuesday these ships will fill critical gaps that current destroyers and cruisers can’t handle. 

He told the symposium, “We were approaching the limit to what we could do and add to the Arleigh Burke class destroyer. We need something newer and bigger that could have more power, accepting more weapons and project more power.” 

Here’s the challenge, though. The Navy is facing massive maintenance backlogs, spare parts shortages, not enough skilled workers, and the shipbuilding industrial base is struggling. 

Now, that industrial base is bringing in a whole new class of battleships that are trying to fill that gap.

They’re also trying to do a lot with artificial intelligence and Palantir to actually create efficiencies within the shipbuilding process.

No matter how you look at it, the goal right now is modernization and spending on these new ideas to create efficiency down the line.

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For The Washington Times and the Threat Status team, I’m John T. Seward.