Trump’s Micromanaging Warship Design Will Set the Navy Back by Decades

These nonsensical steam catapults are just one of several instances of Trump trying to pretend he knows anything about ship design, and they’re making the country weaker.

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heels of his order to replace the Ford-class’s Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, catapults with older, outdated steam-powered catapults on future carriers of the class.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........

© New Republic