Trump's August steam catapult order traces to unidentified Navy sailor

Shipbuilding experts worry returning to steam would put Navy behind China

In August, President Trump signed a national security memorandum directing the Navy to determine the cost and timeline for installing steam catapults and hydraulic elevators on CVN-81, a future Ford-class aircraft carrier expected to join the fleet in 2034. The directive, an overhaul of one of the most expensive weapons programs in history, traces to a chance first-term encounter aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford with a sailor Trump identifies as “Bill Jones,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Navy leaders searched for Jones to clarify what he told the president but never found him, according to defense officials.

It all started just months into Trump’s first term, during a Virginia tour of the USS Gerald R. Ford, the newest carrier in the Navy’s fleet. The warship, the largest in the world and first in its class, cost about $19 billion but had experienced what the Journal described as myriad problems over eight years of construction as cutting-edge but unproven technology was installed on the ship. The carrier was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Trump, the Journal reported, seemed eager to apply his real-estate experience to Pentagon procurement and tired of hearing excuses from admirals. “I said, ‘Let me see the catapult people,’” Trump recalled during an April 2019 speech. “They said, ‘Sir, you don’t really want to do that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, those are the people that know what the hell they’re doing.’”

Trump has described the man as a “catapulter” who served in the Navy for 25 years and loves the smell of steam. The president said the sailor told him the Navy was making a mistake by ditching the tried-and-true method of using steam catapults and warned that the decision to use an electromagnetic system to launch planes faster and more efficiently was dooming the service to failure. Trump has said the sailor argued that if the electric catapults break, “geniuses from MIT” are needed to repair them, while the steam version can be fixed with “a hammer and blowtorch.” Industry officials told the Journal that both descriptions vastly oversimplify the technologies.

After the encounter, Navy officials scrambled to explain to the president why the technologies were chosen and why removing them would be extremely disruptive, according to former defense officials. During a Thanksgiving call in November 2018 to sailors aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, an older Nimitz-class carrier with steam catapults, Trump asked the ship’s commanding officer his opinion of the two systems. Then-Capt. Patrick Hannifin, now a three-star admiral in charge of naval forces in the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans, told Trump that while steam is reliable now, he preferred electromagnetic catapults. When Trump pressed Hannifin that “you have to be Albert Einstein” to operate them properly, the captain responded: “You sort of have to be Albert Einstein to run the nuclear power plants that we have here as well, but we’re doing that very well.” Trump said “that’s actually a very good answer.” The issue seemed to go away.

It came roaring back as Trump sought and won re-election. He mentioned Jones by name during a January 2024 rally in Mason City, Iowa, then brought up the electric catapults again in February 2025 when he swore in Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. There were rumors among industry insiders that Trump would sign an executive order telling the Navy to return to steam, but nothing happened — until this summer.

In August, Trump signed the national security memorandum directing the Navy to figure out the cost and timeline for installing steam catapults and hydraulic elevators in the ship currently known as CVN-81. The Navy isn’t getting its Ford-class carriers fast enough, the Journal reported, and must simplify their design by “using time- and battle-tested technology,” an administration official told the paper. The Navy has not built a carrier with steam since the USS George H.W. Bush, which entered the fleet in 2009.

The two launch systems work on different principles, according to General Atomics, Globalsecurity.org and the U.S. Navy. Steam catapults store pressurized steam in an accumulator before releasing it through a launch valve to force the shuttle forward; the shuttle stops when its front piston enters a water-filled brake, and a cable-and-pulley assembly pulls it back for the next launch. Electromagnetic catapults draw power over 45 seconds from the ship’s two nuclear reactors and release it in a two-to-three-second pulse. Nearly 200 electromagnets along the rails generate a magnetic field that pulls the shuttle along the track, with electromagnetic forces reversed to return it to its starting point.

“Steam catapults have been out of production for decades — no one makes them anymore,” Hunter Stires, the maritime strategist to former Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, told the Journal. Since the order, Navy leaders have couched their public remarks. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle said at a conference in Reno, according to USNI News: “If we were to go back to steam and hydraulics with the elevators, we need to really understand the total cost of that. That will be a significant design change.” Caudle said a February stress test of the Ford’s electromagnetic launchers showed they outperformed their steam peers.

Analysts and industry insiders told the Journal the new system could be more effective for future warfare, since it could launch bomb-laden aircraft and drones. Shipbuilding experts told the paper they worry that putting steam back on a carrier would put the Navy technologically behind China.

Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao warned officials not to question the president’s decision. “To be clear, the debate on whether we do this has ended,” Cao wrote in an Aug. 28 memo, referring to a broader set of recommendations including the steam catapults. “Our task now is to provide the plan on how to implement.” Given the ship won’t be completed before Trump is set to leave office and Democrats are expected to gain control of at least one chamber of Congress in the midterms, the chance that a new ship with the old catapults actually joins the fleet drops significantly, the Journal reported. The Navy is moving ahead regardless.

“This could ultimately be a multibillion-dollar change that was resulting from largely this one sailor’s interaction with the president,” Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, told the Journal. “Which is kind of crazy when you think about the level of impact a single person had.” Trump has gotten personally involved in several other projects, the Journal noted, from the new Air Force One and a class of high-tech battleships to a futuristic military drone port on the top of the White House.

In an attempt to find the mysterious Bill Jones, the Journal contacted current and former Navy officials, lawmakers, White House aides and industry executives. No one who was contacted knows the sailor’s identity. A Navy spokesman told the paper that without his date of birth or other identifying information, the service “cannot accurately locate this Sailor in our records.”