26/08/2026
President Donald Trump has ordered the Department of Defense to draw up a plan for tearing the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System and Advanced Weapons Elevators out of the still-under-construction aircraft carrier Doris Miller (CVN-81) and replacing them with the steam catapults and hydraulic elevators the Navy retired a generation ago.
The order revives a fight Trump has waged with the Navy's carrier engineers since his first term. He complained publicly as far back as 2017 that the electromagnetic system installed aboard the lead ship of the class, USS Gerald R. Ford, was too complicated, telling reporters during a shipboard visit that operators would have "to be Albert Einstein to figure it out" and, in a separate interview, that the system was "not good" and lacked the "power" of the steam catapults it replaced.
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