US President Donald Trump will make an announcement about ship-building Monday afternoon, a White House official said, with Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Navy Secretary John Phelan in attendance.
The announcement will take place at 4:30 pm (2130 GMT) in Florida, where Trump is spending the holidays at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
The White House official did not provide further details, but Trump’s remarks will come just days after the Navy publicized plans for a new class of frigates dubbed the FF(X) that it said will “complement the fleet’s larger, multi-mission warships.”
Phelan said the FF(X) will be based on an existing design from ship-builder HII that is already in use by the United States Coast Guard, and that the aim is for the first of the new frigates to be in the water by 2028.
The new frigate plans were announced after Phelan said in late November that four of six planned ships from the Constellation class of frigates would be canceled, while two that are already under construction are “under review.”
“I will not spend a single taxpayer dollar unless it contributes directly to readiness and our ability to defeat future threats,” Phelan said in a video posted on X at the time.
Washington has fallen significantly behind Beijing when it comes to the number of ships in its Navy, and a report to Congress earlier this year noted that “US military officials and other observers are expressing concern or alarm regarding the pace of China’s naval shipbuilding effort.”
The latest US efforts to boost its Navy come during a massive buildup of American forces in the Caribbean — including the world’s largest aircraft carrier — that is widely seen as aimed at pushing Venezuelan leftist leader Nicolas Maduro to step down.
As part of the pressure campaign on Caracas, the United States has already seized two sanctioned oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela, and a White House official said over the weekend that US forces were in pursuit of a third such vessel.
Add Comment