Last weekend The Washington Post published an article reporting that Donald Trump wants the Navy to redesign the Gerald R. Ford-class of aircraft carriers to better meet his sense of aesthetics by moving the island control tower closer amidships. The reason is reportedly that it would make the carriers look more like the WWII-era Essex-class carriers that were the standard in the early years of the Cold War when Trump was growing up.
This follows close on the heels of his order to replace the Ford-class’s Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, catapults with older, outdated steam-powered catapults on future carriers of the class. He has been obsessed with this since 2017 when he heard a sailor gripe about the new EMALS. This change will require a massive redesign of the class, increasing costs by billions and delaying the launch of the USS Doris Miller, scheduled for 2034.
It will also make future carriers significantly more expensive to operate and will reduce the effectiveness of their catapults. EMALS has the advantages of greater launch precision, lighter system weight, less space required, faster recharge times, and reduced manpower and maintenance needs compared to older steam catapults.
In doing so, Trump has fallen into the folly of dictators throughout modern history of meddling in the technical details of new weapons systems, delaying their introduction, and damaging their own country’s military capabilities in the process.
Joseph Stalin heavily micromanaged Soviet military technology, personally tracking foreign hardware specs, green-lighting unorthodox experimental weapons, and directing massive defense industrialization while simultaneously purging key military theorists and engineers under the threat of terror. He was a politician and not an engineer. The bigger the project, the better.
Stalin championed a grand-fleet naval program focused on massive, traditional heavy surface ships that became white elephants. Rejecting the rising importance of aircraft carriers and modern fleet integration, he insisted on building obsolete Sovetsky Soyuz-class super-battleships and large gun-heavy cruisers that mismatched Soviet industrial capacity and strategic needs. When he died in 1953, the incomplete hulls of these ships were quietly sent to the breakers.
Adolf Hitler similarly meddled and micromanaged, but without even Stalin’s organizational skills and systematic approach. His mercurial obsessions led to delaying practical production of advanced weapons like the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter by insisting it be used as a bomber, canceling effective small arms programs, and demanding slow, resource-heavy “wunderwaffen” (wonder weapons) instead of prioritizing mass logistics and standardized production. In particular, he was obsessed with building super heavy tanks that were effectively useless. He also had distinct opinions on how weapons systems should look, and an insistence on neoclassical mega-projects.
Which leads to the discussion of Trump’s other naval project: resurrecting the battleship, but this time with nuclear propulsion and lots and lots of missiles. Virtually every independent military expert I know, including conservative ones, regards the 34,000-ton Trump-class as a phenomenally bad idea. Among the numerous issues are a lack of funding, unprecedented design, high development costs, survivability, role, and poor fit with the current naval doctrine of distributing firepower and sensors across smaller platforms. The fact that it was drawn up to satisfy the egotistical whims of a president intent on naming a mega-ship after himself without going through the usual study of requirements and industrial capacity is often lost in the broader debate of why this is a bad idea.
All of this meddling only serves to make the Navy’s existing problems worse. The Navy has not managed to produce a successful new surface combatant class of ships (e.g., frigates, destroyers, cruisers) since the introduction of the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, or DDGs, in 1991. Since then, the Navy has attempted to build but then cancelled the Zumwalt-class of destroyers (three built), Constellation-class frigates (two under construction), CG(X) program (none built), and the Independence and Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships, or LCS.
The LCS program was a complete fiasco, its ships derisively referred to as “Little Crappy Ships.” They were not capable enough in a modern combat environment, and their propulsion systems proved so unreliable that they are being retired after less than a decade or two in service, when most Navy ships are now expected to last 35 to 50 years.
To make matters worse, the oldest Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are coming up on retirement, and it is widely recognized that the class is insufficient to meet future needs of the Navy. The Burkes simply don’t have the hull space and electrical power necessary to support the next generation of weapons and sensors. Similarly, the last of the Ticonderoga-class cruisers will be retired by 2029, leaving the Navy with no anti-aircraft cruisers left in the fleet. The DDG(X) program was supposed to provide a replacement for both the Burke and Ticonderoga-classes. The design was well underway, but then Trump interfered.
The Trump-class battleship (BBG(X)) effectively sidelines the next-generation DDG(X) destroyer program. The Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan frames the massive battleship as a superior alternative that avoids the capability compromises of a smaller destroyer hull, forcing a pivot away from DDG(X). The Senate Armed Services Committee recognizes this isn’t a great idea and is trying to keep the DDG(X) development program funded. However, the senators aren’t willing to say no to Trump either, and $17 billion is slated for the white elephant in the 2028 budget to develop a ship that will almost certainly barely make it past the PowerPoint and conceptual art stage of development, much less touch water or be commissioned.
Similarly, some of the troubles with U.S. carriers in the war in Iran can be traced to the Navy drawing down its carrier fleet from 15 to 11 over the years since the Persian Gulf War. When Trump delays the procurement of the Doris Miller based on a poorly thought-out whim, it means that an older, more expensive, less capable, less deployable carrier (in this case, a Nimitz-class carrier, possibly the Eisenhower or Vinson) will have to remain in service past its planned decommissioning date to meet the congressionally mandated 11-carrier requirement. The Nimitz-class is nuclear powered, which means that refueling her and extending her life is not economically feasible.
A lot of people have asked when you can safely say that Trump is a dictator. The fact that his party is willing to spend $17 billion to fund a white elephant wunderwaffen that everyone knows is a boondoggle just to humor him and avoid his wrath, even as the country is losing a war, seems like all the proof we needed.
