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New White House Memo Calls for Foreign-Built Warships, Return to Steam Catapults on Ford Carriers

USNI News · back to the audit
President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to consider foreign-built warships and auxiliary vessels for the U.S. Navy, in addition to other proposed changes to shipbuilding, in a sweeping presidential memo released on Thursday. Citing a lack of capacity in the U.S. naval shipbuilding base and cost growth, Trump is instead calling for more foreign investment in U.S. shipbuilding and the use of foreign ship designs that would initially get constructed abroad. An atrophied shipbuilding industrial base, coupled with diminished adjacent supplier bases, has expanded delays and increased costs. The Department of War shall restore both capacity and competition to the maritime industrial base as it expands our naval force structure, reads the memo. It will use proven, reliable, and affordable technologies and ship designs. Trump ordered a redesign of the Navy's future Ford-class aircraft carriers, doing away with the electromagnetic aircraft launch and advanced weapons elevator systems, USNI News has learned. The change will require the Navy to replace the electromagnetic system in future Ford-class carriers with steam catapults and the advanced weapons elevators with hydraulic systems, according to the memorandum signed Thursday, first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Within two months, the Defense Secretary and Secretary of the Navy must submit a plan on how to replace the systems beginning with CVN-81, the future USS Doris Miller. We're not letting any more ships be built with the ridiculous billions of dollars more they spent on electric catapults, and they're not good. They're not nearly as good - too complex, Trump said during his speech. The same thing with the magnetic elevators. We want them to be made hydraulic. Both new classes of catapult-launched aircraft carriers under construction, the French Libre program and the Chinese Fujian, use electromagnetic catapults. In April, then-Secretary of the Navy John Phelan told reporters the Navy was assessing the design of the Ford class.