Trump has long hated the modern electromagnetic catapults, seemingly because he simply doesn’t understand how they work.
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President Donald Trump has ordered a major redesign of U.S. aircraft carriers to revert to a steam catapult system for launching fighter jets, a change expected to cost billions of dollars in order to use technology that’s more than 15 years out of date.
In a presidential memorandum signed on Thursday, Trump ordered the Navy to remove the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) from the newest class of aircraft carriers, the Gerald R. Ford class, and instead use the older steam powered catapults that system replaced. The change would affect the fourth ship in the class, the Doris Miller, as well as other ships yet to be built.
Trump has long fixated on steam catapults and has frequently brought up his idea to dispose of the electromagnetic system, which dates back to his first presidential term. His reasoning is unclear — but appears to simply stem from his inability to understand how EMALS works.
In an interview with TIME in 2017, Trump railed against the “digital catapult system,” recounting an encounter with a soldier who told him that the system was “not good,” but that the steam is also “just brutal.”
“It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out,” Trump said at the time. “Now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be — ‘Sir, we’re staying with digital.’ I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam.”
The last U.S. aircraft carrier built with steam catapults entered the fleet in 2009. The technology has since been updated because the electromagnetic system is more reliable and less expensive to maintain, experts say. EMALS is also more efficient, requiring less space and far fewer sailors to operate, while being able to launch aircraft more quickly.
On top of that, EMALS are able to launch a wider range of aircraft compared to the steam launchers, especially with regard to the newer generations of aircraft.
The change will require a massive overhaul of the current design, experts say, since the steam catapult system has drastically different infrastructural requirements. Work was already halfway done on the EMALS for the Doris Miller, according to the company that makes them, General Atomics.
Experts have expressed confusion over the change, saying that Trump lacks the knowledge to be tampering with military designs.
“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,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) told the Wall Street Journal.
The change is just the latest report of massive waste of taxpayer dollars by Trump, between his nearly $1 billion renovations to the White House to his war on Iran that has killed 3,500 Iranians and cost tens of billions in operational costs while leading to higher energy prices. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has requested Congress pass a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget for next year — a massive increase from this year’s roughly $1 trillion military budget.
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