“A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water,” said one critic.

President Donald Trump on Monday announced that the US Navy is building a new class of warship that will be named after him—but naval warfare experts are warning the project looks like a wasteful boondoggle.

Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote an analysis of the Trump-branded ships the day after their announcement in which he bluntly predicted that they “will never sail.”

Among other things, Cancian argued that the ship being commissioned by the president “will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower.”

As if that weren’t enough, Cancian projected that “a future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”

Dan Grazier, a senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center, also predicted doom for Trump’s prized ships, which he said would be too overloaded with the latest cutting-edge technology to be effective at naval combat.

  battleship, trump