Trump directed the Navy to abandon the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System on its Ford-class aircraft carriers and revert to steam-powered catapults and hydraulic arresting gear.
The order would require changes to carriers already under construction, including CVN-81, the ship currently designated the USS Doris Miller, which is being built for EMALS. Reversing that mid-construction means redesigning systems that are already specified and partly built.
Sen. Mark Kelly, a former Navy combat pilot who flew from carrier decks and later commanded a Space Shuttle mission, was blunt: “Donald Trump knows nothing about this stuff.” He added that Trump is “a marginally failed real estate developer with multiple bankruptcies,” and made the narrower point that carries more weight: “even I wouldn't suggest to the Navy how to engineer specific systems on its ships.”
The substantive objection is not that EMALS has been trouble-free. It is that the person overruling the Navy's engineering choice has no engineering basis for doing so, and that the reversal lands on ships already designed and partly built around the newer system.