A new White House memo has directed the Navy to abandon its electromagnetic aircraft launch system in favor of older steam catapult technology on Ford-class carriers, while simultaneously ordering the creation of a fifth public shipyard and opening the door to constructing some Navy vessels at foreign yards. The directives, issued in mid-August 2026, mark a significant departure from modernization priorities that have defined U.S. naval procurement for years.
Reversing Course on Carrier Technology
The most technically striking element of the memo is the order to return to steam catapults on Ford-class carriers. The Ford class was specifically designed around the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System★. Reverting to steam on ships already engineered around EMALS could raise costs in the process, according to The Hill's reporting.
The administration's stated rationale frames the directives as a bid to restore capacity and competition to the maritime industrial base while expanding naval force structure, language that USNI News cited directly from the memo.
Balancing Domestic Capacity and Foreign Construction
The memo's call for a fifth public shipyard would add government-owned domestic capacity. Yet the same memo proposes outsourcing construction of at least some Navy ships to foreign shipyards—a directive that sits in tension with the domestic expansion push.
The combination of expanding domestic public shipyard capacity while simultaneously pursuing foreign construction has drawn scrutiny from defense analysts tracking naval industrial policy. Together, the directives represent a broad recalibration of how the Trump administration intends to approach naval force structure—one that blends a reversal of recent technology investments with a mix of domestic expansion and international outsourcing whose implementation details remain to be worked out.
★ AI inference: One or more analytical conclusions in this article were drawn by the AI from cited facts and are not directly stated in the cited sources.