On 13 August 2026 a presidential memorandum gave the Pentagon 60 days to plan replacing EMALS with steam catapults on CVN-81, the Ford class carrier Doris Miller. That 60 day clock runs out on Monday 12 October 2026. Read the memo closely and it orders a plan, not a demolition. It names one hull, says nothing about the Advanced Arresting Gear, and is subject to whatever Congress chooses to fund. Nothing of the plan has been made public. The question underneath the headlines is whether the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System is genuinely broken, or whether the Navy is being told to unbuild the one part of the Ford class that has finally started working. We compare EMALS against the C-13 steam catapult on launch energy, software set energy for light unmanned aircraft like the MQ-25 Stingray, airframe fatigue and sortie generation rate, then weigh the Pentagon test office reliability record, the shared energy storage fault, and the Advanced Weapons Elevators that took four years to certify. Then the part that decides it. General Atomics holds a contract worth about 1.2 billion dollars for this ship's launch and arresting gear and says production is nearly 50 percent complete. No steam catapult has been ordered since USS George H.W. Bush, and analysts including Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute say no American manufacturer remains. Meanwhile China commissioned Fujian with three electromagnetic catapults, and France will fit American built EMALS to France Libre. Key facts. Memorandum signed 13 August 2026, plan due 12 October 2026. CVN-81 Doris Miller, fourth Ford class carrier, delivery February 2034. Gerald R. Ford CVN-78, John F. Kennedy CVN-79 and Enterprise CVN-80 keep EMALS. Ford logged 36,863 EMALS launches by March 2026 and a record 326 day deployment. Sources include the White House memorandum text, USNI News, The War Zone, Stars and Stripes, Defense News, CNN and Department of Defense test reporting. #EMALS #USNavy #AircraftCarrier
Source: Why the Navy Is Going Back to Steam Catapults on the Ford Class
