A personal preference repeated long enough eventually becomes a directive applied to an entire fleet.
A story retold over nearly a decade
Before it became policy, it was an anecdote. According to The Guardian, Trump first publicly criticized the electromagnetic catapult system in an interview with Time in 2017, and since then he has retold this story nearly every year, from a call with the captain of USS Ronald Reagan in 2018, fundraising events, CPAC conferences, to a speech at the Army War College in Pennsylvania just one month before signing the directive. A personal preference repeated long enough, under a president with the power to sign orders, eventually becomes a directive applied to an entire fleet. That is worth noting before discussing the technical numbers.
Half the equipment is already built
The problem does not lie in liking or disliking the technology, but in the timing of the order. According to Navy Lookout, EMALS was designed to be deeply integrated into the architecture of the Ford-class carrier, spanning 48 separate shipyard zones different from the layout of steam-powered ships. Meanwhile, the manufacturer indicated that production work on the EMALS and advanced arresting gear system for USS Doris Miller was nearly 50 percent complete. Design changes at this stage are not minor adjustments. According to The Straits Times, switching to steam catapults on this very ship was estimated to cost hundreds of millions of USD in taxpayer money, and Huntington Ingalls Industries is the prime contractor responsible for the work.
The history of EMALS has also been far from smooth. The Navy selected this technology back in 2009 with expectations of reducing long-term operating costs, but the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) repeatedly warned about the poor reliability of the still-maturing equipment, and early glitches once caused USS Gerald R. Ford to enter service later than expected. However, by now the system has accumulated more than 36,863 launches as of March 2026, showing that the technology has stabilized over time. USS George H.W. Bush, commissioned in 2009, is the last American aircraft carrier built with traditional steam catapults.
Winners and losers
General Atomics, the unit describing EMALS and the advanced arresting gear system as proven technology through operational reality, is the clearest loser: the San Diego company faces the risk of losing a major contract mid-stream and must confront what it calls significant risks in cost, schedule, and integration. On the political side, Senator Mark Kelly, a former naval aviator and NASA astronaut, has publicly criticized the decision on social media platform X. The defense industry in general could be an indirect beneficiary: Trump's directive also orders the establishment of a fifth naval shipyard to increase repair capacity for submarines and aircraft carriers.
What to watch
The real question is not steam or electromagnetic catapults, but whether the Department of Defense is willing to accept additional costs and schedule delays for a ship already behind schedule in exchange for a system that the Navy itself once actively abandoned. The detailed plan from the Department of Defense, expected within the next 60 days, will be the clearest indicator of whether this decision is genuine industrial policy or merely a personal preference institutionalized.
Bảo Nguyễn
Bảo Nguyễn founded Saigon Sentinel to give the Vietnamese diaspora truly independent, in-depth community coverage at a time when misinformation moves faster than fact-checks and the language barrier makes verification harder than it should be. He sets the editorial standards and quality controls that govern the reporting, chooses the subjects, writes and edits each article, reads it against its sources before publication, audits published output, and handles corrections.