After years of criticizing the new electromagnetic catapults on the US Navy’s newest aircraft carriers, President Donald Trump is now officially pushing for a return to steam-powered systems for a future carrier.
The first Navy aircraft carrier to use electromagnetic catapults to launch aircraft was USS Gerald R. Ford, setting a new technology standard for future carriers.
During his first term in office, Trump railed against the new catapults, as well as the new weapons elevators, saying they “don’t work” and telling troops future carriers would use steam.
On Thursday, Trump released a memo on Navy shipbuilding and the industrial base. As part of a longer list of initiatives and investments, including plans to establish a fifth public shipyard and grow the workforce, the president tasked the Department of Defense to begin planning for the replacement of the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, and advanced weapons elevators on a future carrier with steam and hydraulic systems.
Trump gave the Secretary of Defense and the Navy Secretary 60 days to develop a plan with timelines and resource requirements.
The future carrier, USS Doris Miller (CVN-81), will be the US Navy’s fourth Ford-class carrier; the ship is being built by Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding and is scheduled for delivery in 2034, two years later than originally planned.
The Doris Miller is preceded by the USS John F. Kennedy, which is expected to commission early next year, and the USS Enterprise, expected to enter service sometime in 2031.
In the memo, Trump didn’t provide any particular rationale for the shift back to steam and hydraulics; however, the president has a history of complaining about the EMALS. Early in his first term, he referred to it as a “digital catapult system” and demanded the Navy go back “to goddamned steam.”
He has said repeatedly that operators have to be Albert Einstein to work what he has called the Ford’s “crazy electric catapult.”
“They want to show next, next, next,” the president said in a 2019 address to US service members abroad. “And we all want innovation, but it’s too much. There’s never been anything like the steam catapult.”
The criticisms have continued into Trump’s second term. Last month during a defense summit, the president again pushed back on EMALS. “Billions of dollars more they spent on electric catapults, and they’re not good,” he said.
Trump’s plan to switch the catapults, arresting gear, and elevators on the future Doris Miller is expected to be costly and represent a massive shift in the carrier’s construction.
Steam catapults are no longer in production, and the manufacturing lines for the components dried up after the Navy’s last purchase 20 years ago, raising questions about how the industrial base will adapt to Trump’s order.
“The Navy is saving about $100 million a year on the Ford because it requires fewer people and less maintenance,” Bryan Clark, a retired Navy officer and defense expert at the Hudson Institute, told Business Insider on Friday.
“Redesigning the carriers to replumb them for steam piping to the catapults will take multiple years and cost billions of dollars,” he said in an email.
After Trump’s announcement on Thursday, General Atomics, which secured a $1.2 billion contract to build the EMALS and Advanced Arresting Gear for the Miller, said 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 in a statement.
USS Gerald R. Ford, the first-in-class carrier which cost over $13 billion to build, experienced severe delays and cost overruns during construction, set sail on a short deployment in 2022. That was followed by its first full-length operational deployment the following year.
The ship is currently in Virginia for repairs following a long 11-month deployment that saw it support operations in the Caribbean, including the raid to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, and in the Middle East as part of the US war with Iran.
Earlier this year, the Navy said that preliminary reports on the catapults and arresting gear indicated they had “contributed to an increased sortie generation rate compared to that of a Nimitz-class carrier.”
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