President Donald Trump has directed the Navy to strip the electromagnetic launch system from the next aircraft carrier on the production line and install steam catapults instead. The White House released a memo and fact sheet Thursday ordering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deliver an implementation plan within 60 days. The carrier in question, the USS Doris Miller, is already under construction.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told CNN the redesign alone will cost “probably into the billions” and push the ship’s delivery from roughly 2034 to the end of the next decade. The Navy saves about $100 million per year on the Ford class specifically because EMALS is simpler to operate and cheaper to maintain than steam. Steam catapults rely on valves, pressure regulators, and pistons, a parts inventory straight out of the 1950s. The electromagnetic system is tunable per aircraft, recharges in roughly 45 seconds, and puts less stress on airframes. Chris Cavas, a veteran naval journalist who has ridden launches on both systems, called the directive “very old thinking, very outdated” and said the difference is something you can physically feel.
Here is what makes this a structural problem and not a punchline. Nobody manufactures steam catapults in the United States anymore. The last carrier built with them, the USS George H.W. Bush, entered service in 2009. The production lines are gone. The tooling is gone. The institutional knowledge is gone. Restarting that supply chain will cost tens of millions before a single catapult is built, and it will take years. This is not a preference. It is a deliberate dismantling of working infrastructure to satisfy one man’s gut feeling about magnets.
Trump has been fixated on this for years. At a Defense and Innovation Summit in July, he explained his reasoning: “When a little water touches the magnets, it doesn’t work anymore. You’re in the Atlantic Ocean with waves that are 60 feet high, and the Pacific Ocean with waves at 70 feet high, and they’re talking about magnets.” The EMALS system sits on the flight deck, not underwater. Its problems in testing were reliability engineering issues, mean cycles between failures that fell short of targets, not some cartoonish incompatibility between magnets and seawater. The system works at sea. It works on the USS Gerald R. Ford right now.
Adam Cuerden (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsRetired Navy captain and Senator Mark Kelly put it plainly: “I’ve launched off the front of aircraft carriers hundreds of times, have a Master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, and am a test pilot and even I wouldn’t suggest to the Navy how to engineer specific systems on its ships.” He added that Trump should stick to “ballrooms, bankruptcy, and bullshit.”
The harm here is measurable. Clark warned that the delay, combined with Nimitz-class retirements, could leave the Navy “very short on carrying capacity” next decade. That is not a budget line item. That is a readiness gap, a hole in the fleet that affects every sailor and pilot who depends on carrier operations, and every ally who depends on American naval presence. One unilateral directive, rooted in a misunderstanding of how magnets work, and the industrial base that took decades to build gets torched to rebuild a technology the country already moved past.
Hegseth has 60 days to produce a plan. Congress has exactly that long to intervene, hold hearings, and refuse to fund a redesign that the Navy did not request, that no manufacturer can currently execute, and that every expert who has touched either system calls a step backward. The Navy’s own engineers chose EMALS for reasons that are documented, tested, and operational. That choice should not be overruled by a memo built on a fever dream about ocean waves and magnets. Lawmakers who care about accountability, about not burning billions to indulge a president’s superstitions, need to act now. The carrier is already under construction. Every day of delay is a day of wasted taxpayer money and eroded military readiness.
Sources:
CNN: Trump orders Navy to scrap electromagnetic catapults for steam
The Hill: Trump orders Navy catapult reversal