A presidential memorandum signed on August 13 directs the Navy to strip electromagnetic launch and the Advanced Weapons Elevators out of future Ford-class aircraft carriers and replace them with steam catapults and hydraulic elevators. The Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy have 60 days to deliver a plan covering timelines and resourcing, beginning with CVN-81, the future USS Doris Miller. Gerald R. Ford, John F. Kennedy and the under-construction Enterprise keep their electromagnetic systems.
The order sits inside a broader shipbuilding memo that also opens the door to foreign-built surface combatants and auxiliaries, directs a study on a fifth public shipyard, and calls for a review of Naval Sea Systems Command. The catapult reversal is the piece with the deepest engineering consequences.
The grievance is real, and it is about acquisition, not physics
Ford was a concurrency failure of textbook proportions. Roughly two dozen first-of-kind systems were developed while the hull that would carry them was already being built. GAO attributed about $2.4 billion of the lead ship’s overrun to that concurrent development, concentrated in EMALS, the Advanced Arresting Gear, the dual-band radar and the weapons elevators. For comparison, the final Nimitz-class hull came in around $6.2 billion using mature systems refined across nine previous ships.
There is also a legitimate architectural criticism that rarely gets made in public. The four electromagnetic catapults share energy-storage and power-conversion equipment, which means certain faults propagate across more than one catapult, and the layout makes it awkward to troubleshoot one while the others are launching. Steam catapults are more independent from each other. That is a genuine availability argument, and it is not the argument the memo rests on.
The Advanced Weapons Elevators earned their reputation too. Kennedy’s delivery slipped in part on elevator and arresting gear testing, and the Navy only recently notified Congress that seven of the ship’s eleven elevators are complete, enough to reach all magazines and continue certification.
Why a steam reversion is a class redesign, not a component swap
The Ford hull has no steam distribution system to revert to. The class was drawn around an all-electric plant in which the A1B reactors feed turbines driving a shipwide grid at 13,800 volts, against 4,160 volts on a Nimitz. Steam and hydraulic auxiliaries were deliberately deleted throughout the hull, and internal volume was reallocated on that assumption. Putting catapults back on steam means adding steam generation, cross-deck piping, water brakes, associated cooling and the freshwater production capacity to feed all of it, into a ship with no reserved space for any of it. Analysts describing the change to Breaking Defense put it plainly: restoring steam lines to the catapults requires extensive redesign of the ship.
The industrial base for the old system is also gone. C-13 catapult production ended after the last Nimitz installation. Tooling, vendor base and skilled labor would have to be reconstituted from scratch, which is precisely the category of schedule risk the same memo elsewhere claims to be eliminating.
CVN-81 is not a clean sheet either. General Atomics, which holds a $1.2 billion contract for EMALS and AAG on Doris Miller, says production is nearly half complete and that reversing course now introduces significant cost, schedule and integration risk. The company’s statement warns of implications for carrier readiness and for the supplier base the administration says it wants to strengthen.
The capability the Navy would be giving up
Electromagnetic launch tailors energy to the airframe. That matters at both ends of the weight range. It can throw the heaviest strike loads, and it can launch aircraft too light for steam to handle safely, which is the entire unmanned category. MQ-25 and the collaborative combat aircraft behind it are carrier-capable because electromagnetic launch makes them so. A steam-equipped Doris Miller would be structurally worse suited to the air wing the Navy is actually building toward in the 2030s. Reduced airframe fatigue and finer launch control go with it.
The operational record has also moved since the criticism was first formulated. Ford had logged nearly 37,000 electromagnetic launches as of March 2026. During the ship’s most recent deployment the Navy ran a four-day sortie generation test in February that reportedly beat Nimitz-class rates, though the service has not released the data.
Both other carrier programs currently building catapults have gone the same direction. France’s PANG and China’s Fujian both use electromagnetic systems. A reversion would leave the United States as the only navy building new catapult carriers on steam.
A split class carries its own bill
Even if the redesign is executed cleanly, the outcome is a single class operating two incompatible launch architectures. Three ships with electromagnetic catapults and electromagnetic elevators, the rest with steam and hydraulics, means duplicated training pipelines, duplicated spares inventories, duplicated maintenance procedures and duplicated technical documentation for the fifty-year service life of the class. Fleet-wide, that is a permanent overhead cost paid in exchange for a system the service has already finished debugging.
The weapons elevator reversion is the more defensible half of the order. Those problems were more persistent, hydraulic and cable-driven alternatives are better understood, and the elevators are less deeply coupled to the ship’s power architecture than the catapults. Even there, the volume and routing were laid out around linear motor drives.
What the fix should have been
Almost everything the memo is reaching for is available without touching the launch architecture. The failure on Ford was sequencing, not electromagnetism, and the sequencing fix is to require technology to be demonstrated at full scale ashore before it is committed to a hull under construction. The land-based test complex at Lakehurst exists for exactly that purpose and was underused relative to what the program was asking of it. Second, fund a reliability growth effort against the specific weakness rather than the whole system: segregate the power conversion and energy storage so a fault on one catapult does not propagate to the others, and rework the maintenance access so a technician can work one catapult while the remaining three continue launching. That single change addresses the strongest operational complaint against EMALS and costs a fraction of a redesign. Third, freeze the CVN-81 baseline and stop the iterative redesigns that the memo’s own NAVSEA review section identifies as a source of delay, then buy the following hulls in blocks against that stable configuration so the yard and the vendor base can plan against a known drumbeat. The Advanced Weapons Elevators deserve a harder look than the catapults do, and if a conventional drive is genuinely more reliable, that is a subsystem swap the ship’s architecture can absorb. Ripping out the launch system is not.
Congress is already pushing back on the foreign shipbuilding provisions in both the Senate and House versions of the FY 2027 defense policy bill. The catapult directive will meet the same committees, and the 60-day plan will arrive with a price tag attached.