This probably won’t get the attention or, frankly, outrage that it deserves because it’s kind of technical. But it’s stunning and a ‘Caligula making his horse a senator’ kind of craziness, as revealed in a new report from The Washington Post.
The US is in the process of transitioning from the Nimitz class to Ford class aircraft carriers. The USS Ford is already in service. I think one other Ford class ship is in the testing phase. (For clarity, the class of ship takes its name from the first shape in production. So there’s a USS Ford and then a Ford ‘class’ of ships which follow the same design.) The tower on the Ford class ships is swept toward the back of the ship. That has some safety advantages but it also creates a much longer launch and storage area. President Trump has decided that he prefers the look of the World War II era battleships where the tower is in the middle of the ship. And he is pushing the Navy (and considering ordering the Navy) to move the tower forward on the Ford class ships. This comes after Trump just a few days ago ordered the Navy to go back to steam-powered catapults (the thing that hurls the planes forward off the ship for takeoff) from the new electromagnetic catapults. He apparently wants to do this because he once talked to a catapult operator who told him the old kind was better.
The WaPo piece focuses on the fact that making the change to the placement of the tower could lead to more delays and cost billions of dollars. That’s certainly true but that must radically understate the problem. I have a smattering of knowledge about naval architecture. Others will real knowledge could say a lot more. But these are extremely complex and integrated designs. The tower is a fundamental part of any capital ship. Every other part of the design is going to be based to a greater or lesser degree on where the tower is placed. You can’t just move it around any more than you can eyeball a fighter jet and say, I think it would look better if the wings were further back. You can make adjustments and with a lot of time and expense you can probably do it. But you’re going to end up, inevitably, with a jury-rigged and substandard design.
To really do it right you need to start from scratch and come up with an integrated design that places the tower in the middle of the deck. That of course loses the advantage of having a longer unobstructed flight deck which at least seems pretty commonsensical to me. But that’s a technical issue I don’t know enough about. But to give context the design process for the Ford class ships started in the late 90s. It’s probably not totally going back to square one. But this gives some sense of the time scale of the problem. Inevitably, especially under Trump rules, you’re going to be rushing the process and end up building jankiness into the foundations of the ships that are the cornerstone of the modern Navy and in key ways the entire US military.
Trump’s decision to order the Navy to go back to steam catapults is slightly more complicated. The decision to move to electro-magnetic catapults was a subject with some controversy. Some people thought it was a kind of over-teched solution in search of a problem. The steam catapults were fine, etc. I have no ability to litigate who was right or wrong about that. My impression is that once they got the kinks worked out the new technology works great on the USS Ford. In any case, switching back is a mammoth undertaking, and certainly not something you’d ever want to do based on the president talking to some retiree who told him the old ones were better.
I note the issues with the catapult design only to make clear that there were at least some non-crazy people who disagreed with the move away from the steam system in the first place. So it’s slightly different, though still plenty crazy. This tower thing is at a whole other level. (My strong assumption is that the Navy will just try to slow-roll this and hope for a less insane president in 2029.) These are all really just ballrooms and triumphal arches in the sea, the product of the full mad king phase of the Trump presidency.