Presidents from George Washington to Franklin Roosevelt have built up America’s navy, but few American leaders have taken so keen an interest in ship design as Donald Trump.
He loves “Victory at Sea”, a 1950s documentary about the American navy’s exploits in the second world war, with battleships firing big guns and planes taking off from the pitching decks of aircraft-carriers. During his speech at the Republican National Convention in 2024, the most important speech in his presidential campaign, he went off script to boast about his redesign of a warship’s bow in his first term so they “look like yachts”. The reaction in the shipyard, he claimed, was “This guy sort of knows what he’s doing.”
As happens with Mr Trump, some good sense mixes with the bizarre. His memorandum allows foreign firms to build warships if they invest in, and later bring production to, American shipyards. Yet EMALS is now the proven technology, whereas steam would perpetuate the bad habit of continuously redesigning ships.
It notes, rightly, that naval programmes suffer from “overly complex designs” and directs the Pentagon to use “proven, reliable, and affordable technologies”.
The USS Abraham Lincoln is home-bound after more than 270 days at sea, amid reports of food shortages and attempted suicides. Most important, new ships would take longer to come online, creating a gap as older ships go out of service. The war in Iran has underscored the value of having floating air bases. But the fleet is stretched by successive deployments. It will be replaced by the USS George Washington, which had been stationed in Japan, leaving the western Pacific without a carrier at a time of jitters about China’s power. Traditionally, the benefit of redesigning a ship had to clearly outweigh the costs of removing it from action. This master builder seems to have a different calculus.
