President Donald Trump’s proposed fleet of 15 nuclear-powered battleships for the U.S. Navy was given a rather steep price tag this week by the Congressional Budget Office: about $275 billion over the next three decades.

Adding these to the list of existing naval orders, American shipyards would need to produce more than twice as much tonnage in large-surface combatants by 2035 to meet delivery schedules, something a CBO report said “could be a challenge.”

That is the understatement of the century. Navy and Coast Guard shipbuilding programs are already collectively “billions of dollars over cost and years behind schedule”, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Take a step back, though, and the fleet of nuclear-powered Trump-class battleships can be seen as just the latest addition to an extraordinary American military shopping list.

Forget the white picket fence surrounding the house in the ‘burbs and the smiling family; the American Dream promises that anyone can build a good life if they work hard. It does not promise that you can have everything, all at once.

That’s exactly what the Pentagon seems to want.

Have Your Ships And Fire All Your Missiles, Too

Setting aside the totally legitimate question of whether a 15-strong fleet of gigantic battleships is even a worthwhile pursuit at all (acclaimed naval historian and organizational scientist Trent Hone argues the operational concept behind the Trump-class design is “weak” and contradicts the Navy’s wider strategy), building it is currently beyond the purview of America’s shipbuilders.

The Trump-class ship would be the largest U.S. surface combatant built since World War II. CBO estimates the first, dubbed USS Defiant, would cost about $23.4 billion, with later vessels averaging about $18 billion each. The Navy also wants more submarines and other surface ships, while maintaining an existing naval fleet of carriers, destroyers and frigates.

At the same time, the Iran war has demonstrated the voracious appetite of the U.S. military for expensive precision weapons in both offensive and defensive operations.

Under current delivery projections, stocks of Tomahawk missiles, Patriot air defense and THAAD interceptor missiles will take more than three years to return to pre-Iran war levels, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)—and that’s assuming no more are fired in the Middle East.

Then, there’s the Golden Dome, another promise of the Trump administration that calls on the defense industry to painstakingly construct a web of overlapping air defense systems, including space-based interceptors, to form a near-impenetrable security blanket over the mainland United States.

The Pentagon has yet to publish a final architecture for the Golden Dome, but a CBO model of a system broadly matching the administration’s stated objectives puts the acquisition and operating bill at a cool $1.2 trillion over 20 years.

That’s a ridiculous sum of money to conceptualize, so perhaps it’s better expressed like this: more than 3 percent of America’s entire national debt, or almost 4 percent of last year’s GDP.

Each of these initiatives represents a complex and very costly project for the defense industry, but there’s another imperative: to build out an arsenal of inexpensive, expendable but technologically advanced drones to address the challenges of modern warfare exemplified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Taken together, these demands represent not just an impossible industrial challenge; they are the result of completely different theories of how America should prepare for the future of warfare.

Some call for the U.S. military to concentrate extraordinary power in a small number of “exquisite” platforms. Others call for developing a wealth of expensive precision weapons to sustain a prolonged conflict, or a model based on cheap systems that can be produced by the million and redesigned at a moment’s notice.

None of these approaches necessarily exclude or contradict the others. The problem is that Washington is trying to optimize for all of them at once.

Money Doesn’t Solve All Your Problems

If there’s one thing the United States knows how to do, it’s spend. How else do you think the almost $40 trillion of national debt got there?

Throwing money at this problem simply won’t work, though. Industrial capacity cannot be bought into existence—skilled workers need to be trained, shipyards need to be refitted and expanded to build larger, more technologically advanced ships, and the myriad materials and parts required must be sourced from trusted suppliers.

The scale of the manpower problem alone is no joke. In January, a McKinsey analysis of Labor Department projections found that an additional 200,000-250,000 maritime workers are needed over the next decade to meet U.S. military and commercial shipbuilding program requirements, provided that demand doesn’t increase further.

A similar problem shows up in addressing missile stocks, even as Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claim there are plenty left to go around. CSIS calculations suggest the recent production rate of Tomahawks has been below 200 missiles a year, while more than 1,000 were expended during the Iran war. The Navy has consequently requested 785 new Tomahawks in the FY2027 budget—but those missiles are not projected to start reaching U.S. inventories until March 2030.

Drones require a totally new way of thinking. These may be cheaper than building a nuclear-powered battleship fleet or national air-defense network. Still, America’s defense industry is designed for multiyear, multi-billion-dollar procurement timelines, not churning out millions of units whose redesign and development requirements are measured in months rather than decades.

These programs are not necessarily constrained by the same bottlenecks. Welders in a shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, are not the same workers assembling Patriot missiles. Equally, cutting down orders of naval vessels will not automatically free up resources to produce another 500,000 drones. But each program draws from the same finite reservoir of specialized, skilled workers, critical materials, and Pentagon management attention.

The defense industrial base is already failing to deliver existing programs on time and on budget. At some point, Pentagon officials will have to decide what takes priority in a strategy that identifies everything as urgent.

The Chicken-and-Egging Of Military Capability

America can’t build all the new military capabilities it wants without first rebuilding an industrial base capable of delivering them. On the flip side, defense contractors can’t build factories, hire thousands of workers and invest in cutting-edge production processes without credible demand and guaranteed funding.

Perhaps, then, the Pentagon’s enormous and very expensive shopping list is part of the solution.

There are signs that demand is already generating new capacity, sparking a regeneration of the defense industrial base. CSIS estimates roughly 10,000 new firms entered the defense market in the past two years, while the value of Pentagon contracts awarded to “nontraditional companies”—companies from outside the established circle of prime defense contractors—has doubled over the past decade to $122.6 billion in 2025.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is pushing hard on drones with a recently announced $1.1 billion, two-year Drone Dominance Program designed to stimulate competition between domestic suppliers to deliver hundreds of thousands of units. Last month, the U.S. and Ukraine also signed a statement of intent that will see Kyiv send a variety of its most advanced drones to Washington for testing.

Even Trump’s “Golden Fleet” of battleships could serve a similar purpose. Not all 15 ships need to be built if the proposal itself, evoking memories of the grand battleships of old and the national pride in naval prowess, manages to stimulate investment in American shipyards and rekindle domestic manufacturing capacity. But the Pentagon will still have to be selective about which capacities and products it prioritizes.

In a perfect world, the United States would be the world leader in highly sophisticated military platforms, retain a massive arsenal of formidable missiles, and master a new kind of cheap, adaptable defense technology manufactured and deployed en masse. In the real world, each of these represents a bet on the kind of capabilities current and future wars will demand.

The United States military and the defense industrial complex that underpins it can certainly try to be best at everything. Unless Washington adequately ranks its priorities, though, it risks discovering, years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, that trying to build everything at once left it with too little of what is needed most.