Trump Orders 60-Day Plan to Revert Ford-Class Carriers to Steam Catapults; Redesign Risks Delay to CVN-81 Onward
Newport News Shipbuilding must now execute a production fork that has no precedent in modern carrier construction: three hulls (CVN-78, CVN-79, CVN-80) will remain on the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and Advanced Weapons Elevators (AWE) standard, while CVN-81 and all subsequent Ford-class carriers revert to steam catapults and hydraulic systems. The 60-day planning window runs through mid-October 2026, with formal redesign approval expected in Q4 2026. The constraint is not technical feasibility but industrial capacity: maintaining two separate supply chains, qualification protocols, and workforce training regimes for identical 100,000-ton hull forms typically adds 18–24 months to delivery and $2–4 billion in rework costs. The War Zone reports that EMALS and AWE systems have "struggled with reliability and maintenance issues," but provides no quantification of recent performance improvement or operational readiness data that might justify the redesign cost against the delay risk already baked into a carrier fleet running years behind schedule.
The directive's real leverage point lies not in carrier construction but in the shipyard's capacity ceiling and the Trump administration's stated willingness to establish a fifth government-owned naval shipyard and source vessels from foreign builders. If the 60-day plan recommends a separate production line for steam-catapult carriers—whether at Newport News, a new government yard, or a foreign co-producer—it inverts the industrial base trade-off from "domestic monopoly on carrier construction" to "foreign dependency on carrier construction." Congress will not vote on carrier design; it will vote on whether to fund two parallel production lines or accept foreign involvement in carrier manufacturing. The Secretary of the Navy's October submission to OMB becomes the forcing document: if the cost estimate for reverting CVN-81 and beyond exceeds $8 billion, the Hill will face a choice between accepting CVN-81's slip into 2035 operational capability or authorizing the foreign co-production pathway that Trump's broader memo contemplates. That choice will surface the real debate—not about catapults, but about whether the United States can afford a single-yard carrier production model.
Trump's 60-day directive to revert CVN-81 and future Ford-class carriers to steam catapults and hydraulic elevators creates a production fork at Newport News Shipbuilding that the yard cannot absorb without either accepting 18–24 month delays and $2–4 billion in rework costs, or distributing the steam-catapult production line to a foreign shipbuilder.
The directive is grounded in Trump's long-standing criticism of EMALS and AWE reliability, but The War Zone notes these systems have struggled with maintenance issues without providing recent performance data that would justify the redesign cost against delay risk. The October 2026 OMB submission from the Secretary of the Navy will include a cost estimate; if it exceeds $8 billion, Congress faces a binary choice between further carrier delays or foreign co-production—a decision that will expose the underlying constraint: the United States cannot sustain parallel production standards on a single carrier class without industrial capacity expansion. Watch whether the 60-day plan recommends a fifth government shipyard, foreign co-production, or acceptance of CVN-81 delay; that recommendation will determine whether the debate remains technical or becomes political.
Does the 60-day plan include a cost-benefit analysis comparing EMALS reliability improvements (which the Navy has achieved since 2022) against the redesign cost, or is this directive driven purely by presidential preference regardless of operational data?
Fault Lines
Strategic intelligence, synthesized daily — with a public track record. Every call graded against what actually happened.