President Donald Trump is ordering the U.S. Navy to rip out the advanced system used to launch fighter jets from its newest aircraft carriers and go back to older steam catapults, a move that would likely cost billions of dollars and force the fleet’s most advanced ships into a more labor-heavy setup.
The directive, issued Thursday, tells the Pentagon and the Navy to present Trump with plans within two months to remove the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, and replace the Ford-class carrier’s electromagnetic weapons elevators. The fourth Ford-class carrier, the USS Doris Miller, is set to be the first ship forced into the change. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the USS John F. Kennedy and the USS Enterprise would be left untouched.
Who Gets Ordered Around
Trump has pushed steam catapults for years. In 2017, he told Time magazine the newer system was "not good" and "doesn't have the power" of the older steam systems. "You’re going to goddamned steam," Trump said then. The subject has kept surfacing at rallies and other events, a reminder that even the machinery of war gets dragged through presidential vanity and command culture.
The memo lands while the U.S. military is trying to squeeze more money out of Congress for the equipment it wants and while the Navy is struggling to fill its ships with enough sailors. Trump’s directive also complains about the Navy’s constant design changes, which he says have resulted in "cost growth, delays, and cancellations." That’s the language of the apparatus admitting its own mess, even as it keeps demanding more.
General Atomics, which makes EMALS, said in an email to The Associated Press that the decision not to proceed with the system on the USS Doris Miller "warrants careful reconsideration." The company said work on the Doris Miller’s catapults and arresting gear was already halfway complete and warned that "changing course now would introduce significant cost, schedule, and integration risks." The people doing the work get the bill for the boss’s mood.
Who Pays for the Pivot
The electromagnetic system has clear advantages on paper. It can launch aircraft at faster speeds, takes less space aboard ship, is easier to maintain, and requires fewer sailors to operate. On the USS Ford, EMALS cut the number of sailors needed to operate the catapults from about a dozen to two. In February, the Navy said in a press release that the system allowed the USS Ford to launch and recover aircraft at a higher rate than the older Nimitz-class ships.
That’s the part the hierarchy doesn’t like to dwell on: fewer workers, less space, more efficiency. Instead, the order pushes the fleet back toward a system that takes more sailors to run and is harder to maintain. The cost doesn’t stay at the top. It lands on the people who keep the ships moving and on the public expected to foot the bill.
The newest Chinese aircraft carriers use electromagnetic catapults, and France says it plans to use the system on its new carrier. But the U.S. Navy is now being told to reverse course on its own newest ships, with the USS Doris Miller singled out as the first target for the rollback.
The Money Machine Keeps Running
The timing is ugly even by Pentagon standards. Congress is weighing the budget and funding bills the Trump administration says are needed to fund the Pentagon and the Iran war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth estimated last month that the war’s cost had grown to $37.5 billion as Republicans prepared a $95 billion package to fund the military and other White House priorities. Hegseth called the supplemental war funding an "urgent, necessary" injection of money and described Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget as a generational investment in the military.
The House narrowly adopted both measures, but the Senate still has to act when it returns in September. So the money pipeline keeps moving, even as the Navy faces about 20,000 unfilled posts across the fleet at the start of the year. More spending. More shortages. More top-down decisions.
Trump’s order doesn’t just swap one launch system for another. It forces a costly reversal on ships already built around the newer technology, while the people below are left to absorb the disruption, the labor, and the consequences of a command structure that treats the fleet like a toy box for presidential preferences.