WASHINGTON—The U.S. Navy is examining whether to alter the physical design of its newest aircraft carriers to satisfy President Trump's preference for a look closer to World War II-era warships, according to seven current and former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the discussions.
At issue is the island—the multistory tower on the flight deck that serves as the carrier's command center. The Navy is studying whether to move it farther forward, toward the middle of the ship, to give the vessel a silhouette more like older carriers from the 1940s. Current Ford-class carriers position the island farther aft.
Naval experts who have spoken to reporters warn that relocating the island is not a cosmetic fix. The tower is integrated into the ship's combat systems, communications infrastructure, propulsion exhaust routing and structural load calculations. Moving it on a vessel already under construction—rather than on a clean drawing board—multiplies both cost and disruption. Experts put the price of such a change in the billions of dollars and say it would trigger severe schedule delays.
The carrier redesign question follows a separate Trump directive that became public earlier: the president ordered future carriers to abandon electromagnetic catapult systems in favor of steam-powered ones. The electromagnetic catapult system, known as EMALS—the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System—was one of the central engineering advances of the Ford class, designed to launch planes with more precision and less stress on airframes than older steam catapults. Trump has long criticized EMALS as unreliable and too expensive.
The Ford-class program is already among the most expensive shipbuilding efforts in U.S. history. The lead ship, USS Gerald R. Ford, cost roughly $13 billion to build—more than double original projections—and spent years working through reliability problems before the Navy declared it combat-ready. Two additional Ford-class carriers are in various stages of construction: USS John F. Kennedy and USS Enterprise. It is those ships, currently being built at Huntington Ingalls Industries' Newport News Shipbuilding yard in Virginia, that any redesign would most directly affect.
The Navy has not publicly confirmed the deliberations. No formal redesign order has been announced. The service's examination of feasibility, as described by the seven officials, means the question is still in the analysis phase—but seven people inside and formerly inside the government are aware of it, indicating the discussions have moved beyond casual conversation.
The political dynamic behind the push is straightforward. Trump has made military hardware aesthetics a recurring theme. He has publicly criticized the Ford class's EMALS system in interviews and has expressed admiration for the visual lines of older, conventionally designed carriers. His administration has the authority to direct the Pentagon to study changes, and the Pentagon has complied with the feasibility review.
What the officials describe as the core tension is that presidential preferences and engineering realities operate on different timelines. A carrier under active construction at Newport News has thousands of workers, contracted suppliers and a fixed sequence of assembly steps. Halting that sequence to relocate a major structural feature means idling labor, renegotiating supplier contracts and potentially scrapping work already completed and paid for.
The schedule consequence matters beyond the individual ships. The Navy operates 11 carrier strike groups and has commitments in the Pacific, the Middle East and the Atlantic. Any delay in bringing Kennedy or Enterprise into service extends the period those hulls are unavailable, which affects deployment rotations across the entire fleet.
Congress holds the appropriations authority that would fund any redesign. Defense committees on both sides of the Capitol have already pressed the Pentagon on Ford-class cost overruns in prior years. Whether House and Senate members would authorize additional billions to change a ship's appearance—rather than its combat capability—sets up a clash between the White House's preferences and a Congress that has repeatedly flagged aircraft carrier spending as a target for scrutiny.
No cost estimate has been released publicly by the Navy or the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The billion-dollar figures cited by naval experts are informed assessments based on the complexity of mid-construction structural changes, not official program numbers. The actual figure, if the Navy's feasibility study produces one, has not been made available to the public.
