A president who once called the Navy's newest catapults "goddamned" technology has now signed an order to tear them out of a warship mid-build and replace them with steam pipes from the 1950s.

"You're going to goddamned steam."

— President Donald Trump, in a 2017 interview, about the electromagnetic catapult system he has now ordered reinstated in reverse

For nearly a decade, the electromagnetic aircraft launch system, or EMALS, was the punchline of a joke only Donald Trump seemed to find funny. On the campaign trail, in interviews, and at rallies, the president mocked the magnetic catapults that shoot fighter jets off the decks of America's newest carriers, calling them expensive, overcomplicated, and, in his 2017 phrasing, not up to the job. On Thursday, the joke became a directive. A national security presidential memorandum signed on August 13 orders the Pentagon and the Navy to present a plan, within sixty days, to strip EMALS from the USS Doris Miller, the fourth Ford-class carrier under construction at Newport News, and replace it with steam-powered catapults and hydraulic arresting gear.

What looks on paper like a small technical substitution is, in practice, one of the most audacious mid-program reversals in the history of American shipbuilding. The carrier is already in the water at the yard. Its design is frozen. Its electromagnetic launch system crosses forty-eight separate construction zones of a 100,000-ton nuclear-powered warship. Pulling it out does not mean swapping one machine for another. It means ripping out the wiring, piping, and space that a whole class of ships was engineered around.

The order is blunt in its wording. The memo directs the Secretary of War, in consultation with the Secretary of the Navy, to "provide to the President... a plan on the required measures to replace the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and Advanced Weapons Elevators with steam and hydraulic systems" for CVN-81. Only the Doris Miller and any carriers that follow are in scope. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the USS John F. Kennedy, and the USS Enterprise keep their electromagnetic systems. The result, unless the policy shifts again, is a Frankenstein sub-class: a handful of nuclear carriers that launch their jets by pushing a column of superheated steam through a track, sitting in the fleet beside near-identical sisters that launch theirs by firing a linear motor.

The irony lands hardest on the company that is supposed to build the system being cancelled. General Atomics, which holds a $1.2 billion contract for the EMALS and Advanced Arresting Gear on the Doris Miller, told the Associated Press that the decision "warrants careful reconsideration."

"With nearly 50 percent of production complete, changing course now would introduce significant cost, schedule and integration risks," the company said. It added that the reversal would carry "broader implications for carrier readiness, national security and U.S. technological superiority, potentially creating opportunities for adversaries to close the capability gap."

Translation: a third of the Navy's future supercarrier money may be about to be spent to un-build half of a thing that is already half built.

The argument against the order has a long line of credentialed names. Bryan Clark, director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, put it plainly: putting steam catapults and hydraulic gear back on the Ford class makes the ships "less capable and more expensive."

"The Navy is saving about $100M a year on the Ford because it requires fewer people and less maintenance. Redesigning the carriers to replumb them for steam piping to the catapults will take multiple years and cost billions of dollars," Clark said. Steam catapults are no longer manufactured. The Navy bought its last set twenty years ago. Standing that production line back up would take "tens of millions and... years," Clark said, "to stand up this production capacity again."

Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a former carrier strike group commander, called the move "illogical, inefficient and a waste of money." The electromagnetic catapults, he noted, weigh less, use far less energy and water, which are scarce on a ship at sea, and require less maintenance and manpower. The numbers back the point up. Aboard the Ford, EMALS cut the number of sailors needed to run the catapults from about a dozen to two.

And here is the part that should make a sailor wince: the Navy is already short. At the start of the year the service had roughly 20,000 unfilled billets across the fleet. Reverting to steam means adding back the crew to operate it, the piping to feed it, and the space to house it, on ships whose manning problem is one of the most persistent in American defense. In February the Navy was still issuing press releases touting EMALS, saying preliminary test data showed the Ford generating more sorties per day than a Nimitz-class carrier. By March, the Ford had logged 36,863 electromagnetic launches, a number that grew through an 11-month deployment that included the capture of Venezuela's president and operations in the Middle East.

Whatever the early teething problems were, the system has since matured into something battle-proven. The argument against it now is an argument against a version of EMALS that no longer exists.

The geopolitical arithmetic does the quietest, most damaging work of all. While Washington debates tearing out its electromagnetic launch system, the nation it is racing has just finished building one. China commissioned its Fujian, an 80,000-ton carrier, in November 2025, its third and first with catapults, and three of them are electromagnetic. During trials the People's Liberation Army Navy launched its J-15T fighters, its J-35 stealth fighters, and its KJ-600 airborne early warning aircraft through them. France has chosen EMALS for its own next-generation nuclear carrier.

In other words, the United States spent billions to pioneer a technology, overcome a decade of reliability problems, and prove it in combat, and then signed a memo ordering its most advanced carriers back to the machinery of 1970. The one country it is competing against is moving forward on the very system America is demobilizing. General Atomics' warning about "opportunities for adversaries to close the capability gap" is not corporate posturing. It is a description of what the next decade of carrier aviation in the Pacific may actually look like.

The memo is not, to be fair, nothing but a prank. It calls for a fifth public naval shipyard, additional submarine dry docks, a Component Repair Center to stockpile and refurbish nuclear parts, and a reorganization of the Navy's sea systems command. It even invites foreign shipbuilders to build initial ships while training the American workforce, an idea some analysts called the most sensible line in the document. The steam provision, though, risks burying all of it. The memo spends a whole paragraph criticizing "iterative design change procedures" for causing cost growth and delays, and then, a few lines later, orders one of the most profound late design changes imaginable to a warship. The British learned this lesson with their own carriers in 2010, when a plan to add catapults to a Queen Elizabeth-class ship blew up from about £800 million to roughly £2 billion and was quietly dropped.

The Navy now has sixty days to hand the president a plan for a redesign that most of the people who actually build the ships believe it should be told not to do. The likely deliverable is a study concluding, in careful language, that keeping EMALS is the rational choice. Whether the man who signed the order in the first place is prepared to accept that answer is the question the entire exercise hinges on. The one thing in the Navy's favor is time. The Doris Miller is not due in service until the 2030s, and carrier programs run across multiple administrations. Policy changes far faster than a ship does.

The deeper lesson is the one Trump has been handing out in pieces for years: the person who decides how a 100,000-ton nuclear warship launches its aircraft has a master's degree, a test-pilot background, and a very particular opinion, but not the engineering to back it. Senator Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot, said as much on social media, adding that even he would not tell the Navy how to build a catapult. The question is not whether this order is expensive, or whether it is backwards, or whether it hands China a quiet victory on the flight deck. The question is what else this president is about to be told "no" to by the people whose actual job it is to build the country's weapons.

The steam is coming back. The only thing left to argue about is how much it will cost to make it.

trump, navy, defense, emals