Every time Donald Trump does something that sounds simple and obvious, the entire expert class loses its mind. This time he told the Navy to stop putting electromagnetic catapults on its newest carrier and go back to steam. And wouldn’t you know it, the same people who brought you the F-35 that can’t fly in the rain are now hyperventilating about how this is “very outdated thinking.”
Here is the thing nobody in the Pentagon press corps wants to say out loud: the electromagnetic system, EMALS, has been a problem child from day one. The Navy’s own testing showed it couldn’t hit its reliability targets. Mean cycles between failure fell short of the requirement. The USS Gerald R. Ford had to be called back twice because the catapults didn’t work. Trump said it himself last month at the Defense and Innovation Summit: “When a little water touches the magnets, it doesn’t work anymore.”
Now the experts all rush to tell you that’s not how it works. The magnets are on the flight deck, not underwater. Salt water doesn’t short them out. Trust us, we have degrees. But ask yourself: if the system is so wonderful, why did the Ford have to come home twice? Why did it miss every reliability benchmark the Navy set? You’re telling me the President of the United States is wrong and the same procurement system that spent $400 billion on a fighter jet that still isn’t fully combat-ready is right? I know which one I’m betting on.
The electromagnetic crowd, led by Hudson Institute fellow Bryan Clark, says going back to steam will cost “probably into the billions” and delay the USS Doris Miller until the end of the next decade. Chris Cavas, a veteran naval journalist, calls the move “very old thinking.” These are the same people who told you EMALS would be cheaper and easier to maintain. And maybe on paper it is. On paper, a lot of things work. The ocean is not paper.
Here is what the experts also accidentally admitted: nobody in the United States even builds steam catapults anymore. The last one was made for the USS George H.W. Bush, which entered service in 2009. All that manufacturing infrastructure is gone. So the same geniuses who sold the Navy on an electromagnetic system that doesn’t work reliably also let the proven alternative’s entire supply chain disappear. And now they’re shocked that fixing this mess will take time and money. Funny how that works.
Thomas Dahlstrøm Nielsen (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThen there is Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat from Arizona, retired Navy captain, test pilot, man with a Master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. He posted on social media that even he wouldn’t tell the Navy how to engineer its ships, and that Trump should “stick to what he knows best, ballrooms, bankruptcy, and bullshit.” That is a sitting senator talking about the Commander in Chief like a drunk uncle at a barbecue. Kelly has launched off carriers hundreds of times. Good for him. He also spent years in Congress voting on defense budgets that produced this broken system. Maybe he should stick to what he knows best: presiding over procurement disasters and then acting surprised.
The EMALS system saves the Navy about $100 million a year in maintenance and personnel costs, according to Clark. That is real money. But savings on a system that doesn’t work when you need it aren’t savings. They’re a rounding error on a disaster. You can put the smoothest, most tunable, most electronically sophisticated catapult in the world on a flight deck, and if it stops working in the middle of the Pacific because something got wet that wasn’t supposed to get wet, you have a very expensive paperweight with jets on top of it.
Steam catapults have launched aircraft off carriers since the 1950s. Through every war, every ocean, every storm. They are heavy. They are maintenance-intensive. They are hard on airframes. And they work. Every single time. The Navy built ten Nimitz-class carriers around them and projected power across the globe for half a century.
The establishment wants you to believe that going back to what works is backward. That is how they think about everything. If it’s old, it’s bad. If it’s new, it’s good. If it has a microchip, it must be better than a pipe and a piston. Well, the pipe and the piston won every war we actually fought. The microchip couldn’t get through sea trials.
Trump ordered Pete Hegseth to come back with a plan in 60 days. The experts say it can’t be done. The experts said a lot of things. Most of them were wrong. The salt water is still there. The magnets still don’t like it. And the steam still works.