President Grandpa To Power Aircraft Carriers With Water Wheels
Also maybe a cotton gin.
Donald Trump has a long, long, long list of enemies that he keeps in his mange-riddled brain, and over which he can be found fuming at any given moment no matter where he is or what he’s doing. Democrats. The Deep State. The fake news media. James Comey. Adam “Shifty” Shift. Cholesterol. Diet Pepsi. RINOs. Adult diapers with insufficient control of heavy adult leakage. Hollywood. Communists. Socialists. Marxists. The old-money Manhattan elite who didn’t invite him to their dinner parties. Salad.
And lest we forget, electromagnetic catapults for launching planes off aircraft carriers.
Well, Donald J. Trump is president, and so no longer will America’s armed forces labor under the constraints of new and more efficient technology. On Thursday, the White House announced that Trump signed a national security memorandum ordering the Navy to return to using steam catapults in all future Ford-class carriers, of which seven are still to be built.
This move will require significant redesigns of the planned carriers and probably billions of dollars and will likely delay the delivery of the rest of the class, which has already been delayed plenty.
And why? Who knows. Probably Trump saw Top Gun years ago and got very horny for the opening sequence in which helmeted, safety-jacket-clad deck crews launched F-14s while steam cinematically drifted around them as the planes shot off the ships in nut-rattling blasts of power and “Highway to the Danger Zone” blared in his ears.
Trump has obsessed over the steam since his first term. In early 2017, he gave an interview to Time in which he was asked about the future of the Ford-class aircraft carriers, the first of which was just about to be commissioned. He gave one of his typically meandering answers, complete with one of his famous “Sir” stories:
“So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology]. I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, ‘Ah, how is it working?’ ‘Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power.’ You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”
It is unclear who “He” is or where this conversation took place. Was he touring an aircraft carrier? Was he speaking to a Navy admiral in the Oval Office? Was he hallucinating? Was the dementia kicking in?
Whatever it was, Trump’s brain worms had him fixating on bringing back steam-powered catapults, which were invented after World War II and could probably use an update, technology-wise. The last carrier the US built with such a catapult went into service in 2009. But since Trump’s brain stopped gathering incoming data in the 1980s and he was now the commander in chief, everyone had to get on his level:
“‘Sir, we’re staying with digital.’ I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.”
“The digital” does not in fact cost more. The digital system — the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch Systems, or EMALS — is cheaper, partly because it takes fewer technicians to maintain than are needed with the steam-powered system. The first carrier to use the system, the USS Gerald R. Ford, had some pretty bad cost overruns in getting the system to work properly, which delayed its launch, which meant the delivery of the rest of the Ford class got pushed back. But the Navy is planning 10 Ford-class carriers, so presumably they can figure it out by the time the last one is launched. Which, at the rate they are going, will be around 2070 or so.
The Navy is opposed to the steam-for-digital swap. The Navy likes the digital. EMALS accelerates planes more smoothly, putting less stress on their airframes. It is lighter and takes up less space. It takes less time to reset and fewer sailors to maintain. It can launch all sorts of aircraft that a steam catapult can’t.
That last one will be particularly important if future wars involve lots of drones. Which they will.
And that was not the only massive redesign the Navy is considering for this entire class of carriers simply because of Trump’s aesthetic preferences. On Saturday, the Washington Post reported the Navy is considering moving the ships’ tower that acts as its command center farther forward so they will look more like old carriers that were deployed during World War II. No, seriously, the article really says that.
The Navy also examined the issue during his first term as president, said a former senior U.S. official. A study found that moving the island could cost billions of dollars in redesign costs and significantly delay the program, this person said.
No kidding. And imagine all the years of study that went into this that will be out the window because President Grandpa wants the ships to look more like what he might have seen in an old-timey newsreel:
Relocating the island to the back of the newer vessels was done for efficiency and safety, three U.S. current and former officials familiar with the program told The Post. It not only creates more parking space for aircraft close to the carriers’ catapults, allowing crews to reduce the amount of time it takes to launch jets, it also improves landing safety by reducing the chance for turbulence when planes come back to land, the officials said.
Any alterations to the layout also affects the ship’s buoyancy and weight. Nothing major! But Trump thinks he knows more about ship design and naval warfare than anyone else — thinking he knows more about anything than anyone else is a defining character trait for the over-bronzed narcissist — even though his most extensive nautical experience is owning a yacht for two years in the late 1980s. (He sold it when he was heading into one of his bankruptcies.) So here we are.
The good news is that redesigning the ships could easily take more than two years, especially if the bureaucracy slow-walks it. Then Trump will be gone, the lackey he installed as Secretary of the Navy, the execrable Hung Cao, will be gone along with him, and hopefully America in its infinite wisdom will decide to elect a sane person for president.
Speaking of Navy fusterclucks, President Empathy was at it again on Friday. Here are reporters asking him about reports from angry family members that their loved ones working on the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Mideast are so worn out from their long deployment that jumping off the aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean feels like a better idea:
“No they’re not.” Sure, except for the families who have been berating Hung Cao in meetings while he stumbles through his answers. Everyone else is totally onboard, both metaphorically and physically.
The deployment of the Lincoln is the longest for a carrier since the Vietnam War, and by quite a margin the longest without a port call — more than 200 days and counting. Looking directly into the camera and telling all those people they haven’t been deployed for long enough is so dumb that it’s breathtaking. Listen, man, we don’t think you should anger a boat full of already worn-to-a-nub sailors in possession of 70 or so attack planes and plenty of bombs and ammunition. That’s the start of a movie that will be on TNT in two years.
It might even be a documentary.
[White House / Time / WaPo]
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He’s effectively a saboteur.
Whether this is deliberate on his own part is of no significance whatsoever.
And if we really want our aircraft carriers to be safe, each one should have a ballroom.