The USS Gerald R. Ford — the most expensive warship ever built, at roughly $13 billion — is under renewed political pressure to change one of the most carefully engineered features of its design. According to The Washington Post and The Hill, President Trump wants the Navy to move the Ford class carrier's island superstructure further forward on the flight deck, reportedly because he prefers the aesthetics of World War II-era carriers. The Navy is now formally evaluating the proposal.
Why the Island Sits Where It Does
The island's aft position on the Ford class was not arbitrary. It was the product of a design process that began in 1996 under the CVX future-carrier programme and evaluated 75 different conceptual configurations over four years. Retired Navy Captain Tal Manvel, who served as Programme Manager for Future Carriers, described the process in a 2015 presentation at the US Naval Academy Museum: hullforms, flight-deck layouts, and island placement were all exhaustively tested before the Navy settled on the current design.
The results speak for themselves. The Ford's island is 140 feet further aft than the Nimitz class equivalent. It is also smaller and more angular, enabled in part by the Dual Band Radar (later replaced by the AN/SPY-6(V)3 EASR on subsequent hulls) reducing the total number of distinct radar arrays needed. Three aircraft elevators — two starboard, one port, all forward of the island — replace the Nimitz's four-elevator arrangement, which has one elevator aft of the island.
The net effect: the Ford has five acres (217,800 square feet) of flight-deck area compared to 4.5 acres on the Nimitz. That half-acre gain does not sound dramatic until you consider that on a flight deck, every square metre directly translates into sortie-generation capacity, maintenance space, and hot-refuelling flexibility.
Operational Consequences
Then-Captain Paul Lanzilotta, commanding officer of USS Gerald R. Ford, explained the operational benefits in a 2022 interview with The War Zone. The key advantage is that the aft island eliminates recovery breaks for late-launching aircraft. On a Nimitz, if an aircraft parked behind the island needs to taxi forward during recovery operations, the entire cycle must pause. On the Ford, the problem vanishes — every aircraft can taxi to the catapult without interrupting recovery.
The configuration also reduces turbulence at the stern during landing approaches — a safety margin that matters enormously when pilots are putting fast jets on a moving deck in adverse conditions. The distributed aperture remote video system, which replaces the Nimitz's manned Island Camera Room, completes the picture: fewer human stations, better situational awareness, smaller physical footprint.
The Cost of Moving It
A study conducted during Trump's first term found that relocating the island could cost billions of dollars in redesign work and significantly delay the programme. The island is not a free-standing structure — it is deeply integrated into the ship's seakeeping, structural stability, centre of gravity, radar arrangement and combat-system architecture. Moving it would trigger cascading redesign requirements across multiple subsystems and demand extensive retesting of every affected component.
The Ford class is already running years behind schedule. The future USS John F. Kennedy, originally due in 2022, is only now conducting builder's sea trials. Three more hulls — Enterprise, Doris Miller, and either William J. Clinton or George W. Bush — are in various stages of planning and construction. The Navy plans to acquire at least ten Ford class carriers total.
A Broader Pattern
The island directive is part of a wider pattern. Last week, Trump ordered the Navy to replace the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and Advanced Weapons Elevators with steam catapults and hydraulic alternatives on the future Doris Miller — a proposal The War Zone described as a "huge risk." Earlier in his term, Trump pushed for design changes to surface combatants based on aesthetic preferences, including rust-free paint schemes and the Trump class nuclear-powered battleship concept.
The Navy's dilemma is structural. The Nimitz class fleet is under extraordinary strain — USS Abraham Lincoln's marathon Middle East deployment has become a symbol of collapsing readiness — and every delay to the Ford class further extends the burden on ageing hulls. Congress may intervene, and the next administration could reverse course, but in the meantime, the uncertainty itself consumes planning bandwidth.
For European allies who depend on American carrier strike capability as a cornerstone of NATO deterrence, the Ford class island controversy is not a domestic curiosity. It is a signal of how political decision-making can intersect with — and potentially undermine — the engineering choices that determine whether the Western alliance's most important conventional weapons platform can actually generate the combat power it was designed to deliver.