they can postpone actually building this thing until he's out.

I cannot even begin to sufficiently emphasize how wrong this is.

First off, to be clear, these are design changes to carriers that are already in production. These aren't future projects, these are decades in the making projects that are finally coming to fruition. This is literally Trump asking them to stop work on a ship that is half built so that they can redesign it. And we're talking major redesigns here. The kind that involve basically scrapping everything you've built and starting again.

What's worse is that these are ships that are already seriously delayed, and very seriously needed. Carriers are the primary mode of power projection and the core of every naval battlegroup. A carrier is basically a floating forward operating base. They are vital and essential, and most of the 11 in service today were built before the turn of the century. Some are fifty years old.

The original plan for the Gerald Ford class called for one ship to be built every five years. That began in earnest in 2009. Seventeen years later they have... One.

That's really bad. A ship that is supposed to take five years to build, on average, is currently sitting at over fifteen. Now, to be fair, production speeds on anything start slow and improve with time as you get the process down, but even allowing that caveat, the Gerald Ford class is very, very badly behind schedule. The original projections were for the Nimitz class to be fully retired by 2058. The US is about a third of the way towards that deadline and 1/11th of the way towards that production goal.

So what Trump wants to do now is take three currently in production carriers, all of them desperately needed, all of them seriously delayed, and throw out all the work that's been done because he doesn't like their aesthetics.

This is a disaster for the US Navy, one that compounds upon decades of disasters. The last fifty years of US shipbuilding have been failure upon failure upon failure. The Zumwalt and the Litoral Combat Ship, both intended to revolutionize the Navy, both reduced to production runs of two or three ships, left hanging on to the fleet like useless vestigial appendages. The new frigate, cancelled because the Navy couldn't stop over-designing the damn thing, leaving the US with an up-gunned coastguard ship as their potential new frigate instead. The new destroyer, a desperately needed replacement for the ancient Arleigh-Burke, left on life support after its budget was pilfered so that Trump can have a battleship.

Other than the Gerald Ford, the US Navy basically hasn't successfully produced a new design of ship in decades. Meanwhile China is pumping out Type 55 frigates by the dozens. it will not be long before the US is thoroughly outgunned at sea. And worse still, those creaking old Arleigh-Burkes have hit the absolute limits of their hull and power plant. Future upgrades? Forget it. You won't be mounting lasers or railguns on an Arleigh-Burke. Don't get me wrong, it's a very good ship, but it's at the limit of its design. The new Chinese ships are not.

Even Trump's battleship is a monumental problem, because it's pulling vital resources away from all of the projects that actually need it. And because of its immense size and the recently added requirement for a nuclear power plant, actually building it will require the same facilities that are currently building the Gerald Fords. So you've got the vast majority of all shipbuilding resources now being focused on two ships that literally cannot be built simultaneously. Meanwhile shipyards that could be putting out new destroyers or frigates are doing nothing because there are no new designs to build, and the expertise and money needed to make those new designs has been co-opted.

The clock is ticking, and the US Navy was already running out of time a decade ago. They are in serious danger of no longer being able to pose a credible threat to China at all. The fact that the US currently does not have a carrier in the South China Sea, for the first time in decades, is absolute proof of that. There has never been a time in history when the Navy could less afford to let an idiot child play ship designer.

He starts each day with a Chili’s kids menu and some crayons, and a Diet Coke if he doesn’t eat any of the crayons. That’s where his designs come from.