The Washington Post
President Donald Trump set his sights on the Navy in a new interview, calling the service’s new digital catapult to launch planes off of aircraft carriers “no good” and saying that the Navy needs to go back to “goddamned steam,” the method used for decades.
The comments, published Thursday by Time magazine, came during an interview Monday evening at the White House. Trump recounted a conversation he had March 2 while visiting the yet-to-be-commissioned aircraft carrier Gerald L. Ford in Newport News, Virginia, and said that he was told the catapult on it does not have enough power.
“It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out,” Trump said, according to Time.
“And I said — and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers,” the president continued. “I said what system are you going to be — ‘Sir, we’re staying with digital.’ I said, ‘No you’re not. (You’re) going to goddamned steam,’ the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.”
The new catapult to which Trump referred is called the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS). It takes up significantly less space on a ship than steam systems, and works by tapping into a redesigned turbine system that generates more power than those on old carriers. The new digital system also is expected to be able to launch unmanned aircraft, and require less maintenance, according to the Navy.
The Navy said Thursday that it was developing a response. A Pentagon official said that Trump’s comments caught defense officials off-guard and are inaccurate.
“You can see elements of reality in what he said, but I think he may have spoken without having all of the information in front of him,” the official said. “I think he either has time-late information, or the information he has is not correct.”
Pentagon officials are convinced that once they present the latest details about the EMALs to the president, “a lot of the concerns that were raised in the article will be answered,” the official added.
The EMALS was adopted as the Navy designed a new Ford class of “supercarrier” that are larger than older ones. The Ford is expected to be commissioned and delivered to the Navy within a month, and will be followed by similar carriers named the John F. Kennedy and the Enterprise.
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