Navy Weighs Carrier Redesign to Suit Trump

The Navy is weighing a major redesign of its incoming Ford-class aircraft carriers to match President Trump's preference for warships that look like their World War II predecessors, according to a Washington Post report published Saturday and confirmed in reporting by The Hill.

The central change under study: moving the carrier's multistory command tower — the island — from its current position to the middle of the ship.

Sources told the Post the changes would cost billions of dollars and worsen the Navy's chronic construction delays.

What the Redesign Would Cost

Officials told the Post that shifting the command center to the middle of the flight deck would strip away three concrete advantages of the current layout: additional aircraft parking space, reduced launch time, and a lower chance of turbulence during landings.

Carrier construction is already a long slog. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the lead ship of the class, took 17 years to build, with delays driven by the effort to incorporate new technology. That ship debuted the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, a catapult the Navy has credited as highly effective.