Trump Promises `Rebuilding' of Military Aboard Over-Budget Ship

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said that his defense secretary, James Mattis, will lead a "great rebuilding" of the U.S. military, as he visited a new aircraft carrier whose construction in Virginia is delayed and over budget.

Mattis “will be charged with overseeing this great rebuilding of our military might,” Trump said aboard the U.S.S. Gerald Ford, the first of a new class of aircraft carriers under construction at a Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. shipyard in Newport News, Virginia.

“We will have the finest equipment in the world. Planes, ships and every else,” Trump said. “We will give our military the tools you need to prevent war and, if required, to fight war, and to only do one thing. Do you know what that is? Win.”

Trump has pledged to increase U.S. defense spending, starting with a $30 billion addition to this year's budget and a $54 billion boost that administration officials announced on Monday for the budget year that begins in October. That increase would be offset by cuts from the rest of the government's discretionary budget.

He has called the U.S. military, the world's largest, “badly depleted," and made increased defense spending a central plank of his campaign. The U.S. spends more on defense than the next seven countries in the world combined, according to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

“I am calling for one of the largest defense spending increases in history,” Trump said, although defense hawks including Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain has said he isn't proposing enough.

Defense Contractors

Additional surface ships and submarines would benefit the nation's top warship makers -- Huntington and the marine unit of General Dynamics Corp. Increases in the Army would benefit military vehicle builders General Dynamics and BAE Systems Plc, as well as Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co., makers of air defense and anti-armor systems such as Thaad, Patriot and the Javelin.

Trump pledged in his campaign to expand the Navy's fleet to 350 vessels from about 272 today, which the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service estimates would cost an average of $4 billion annually for construction alone.

The Navy set a goal of 305 ships under Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama. Ash Carter, Obama's defense secretary, warned about "irresponsibly" exceeding that goal at the risk of sacrificing quality for quantity. But in December, after the election, the Navy echoed Trump in a new assessment, saying it needed as many as 355 ships.

Trump promised that he'll provide the “twelve-carrier Navy we need.” There are 10 carriers in service today. A second ship in the Ford class, the John F. Kennedy, is also under construction.

$12.9 Billion Ship

The Ford, the first in the planned new class of three carriers, has been plagued by cost overruns and delays. The $12.9 billion ship was originally scheduled to be delivered in September 2014. The Navy's latest status report projected delivery in April.

Trump spoke on the hangar deck of the ship, where a banner read "Integrity at the Helm," the ship's motto.

“It really feels like a place,” Trump said. “You stand on that deck and you feel like you're standing on a very big piece of land.”

Read about a review of the Ford carrier's troubles.

The ship is to be equipped with advanced systems from a number of subcontractors, including Raytheon and General Atomics.

“With the benefit of hindsight, it was clearly premature to include so many unproven technologies” on the vessel, including systems used for power generation, launching and landing aircraft and its radar and elevators to move munitions, Frank Kendall, who was the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, said in a memo in August.

--With assistance from Jennifer Jacobs and Tony Capaccio

To contact the reporter on this story: Shannon Pettypiece in Newport News, Virginia at spettypiece@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Gordon at cgordon39@bloomberg.net, Alex Wayne, Larry Liebert