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Trump wants to reduce capability of newest aircraft carrier.

Ziggurat said:
The order only explicitly demands that the SecWar give him a plan for what would be involved in switching back to steam, including how long it would take and what it would cost. The executive order does not actually commit to following that plan. Whether or not they do could easily depend on how expensive and how time-consuming such a change would be.
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Trump made his attitude towards the new catapults clear a while back. He is not issuing this order to tell us how much he likes the new system. Trump is very reckless with taxpayer money, he is unlikely to care how much it costs, only if it makes him look good or if he can profit from it in some way.
 
Ranb said:
Trump made his attitude towards the new catapults clear a while back. He is not issuing this order to tell us how much he likes the new system. Trump is very reckless with taxpayer money, he is unlikely to care how much it costs, only if it makes him look good or if he can profit from it in some way.
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My only quibble is that everyone once in a while he gets these ideas that do neither but can't let them go. Tariffs being the uber example, he just seems to think they are a good idea and yet them make him look bad and don't seem to really benefit him materially.
 
JayUtah said:
As should be obvious, the question is not whether Method X is more reliable than Method Y, but whether X is reliable enough for the job. If you can tolerate a lower reliability in X where X offers other advantages, then it may still be the better overall choice. This is more true when you have evidence to support the notion that X's reliability will only increase with effort. Understanding this is a big part of what engineers do, and why engineers scream in frustration when no-nothings like Pres. Trump try to overrule them.

The problem is that some of the materials cited to in this thread suggest that magnetic catapults do not meet the required threshold of reliability. As a supplier of technology that must meet arbitrary standards of reliability, I'm acutely aware of the artificially binary condition that imposes. You either testably meet the contractual requirements or you go fish. It's not always possible or advisable to try to negotiate a lower requirement.

There are always details and corner cases, however. For example there may be the notion that the last bit of desired reliability can only be achieved under production conditions. The contracting agency might approve a limited deployment for that purpose.

Honestly I doubt whether Donald Trump has the slightest idea what an aircraft carrier catapult is. This is almost certainly a decision being made by others.

Under this regime that's a possibility. The carrier in question is the USS Doris Miller, a ship notably named for the African American mess steward Dory Miller who distinguished himself at Pearl Harbor by manning a machine gun and attempting to shoot down enemy airplanes—something that he had not been trained to do and which put him in mortal danger. The right has been seething at the thought of a Ford-class aircraft carrier being named after a Black man. Because renaming the ship is still a political third rail, tying the Miller up indefinitely for a refit and not letting it take to sea would seem in line. Originally the justification for the seethe was that Ford-class carriers should only be named for U.S. Presidents. But then they went and named one Enterprise, so no.
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I wouldn't be too sure about that, Trump desperately wants both to be and to be seen as a dictator, and that is the kind of arbritary decision that a dictator will make.

And I'd like to add that manning an AA gun wasn't the only heroic deed Miller did that day.
 
JayUtah said:
Fair enough, not everyone on the right is racist.


One could say it depends on why Chester Nimitz is the only naval admiral to have a CVN named after him. I'm perfectly okay with the convention for CVNs being "U.S. Presidents and famous battles," although the latter now seems to be limited to battles for which previous aircraft carriers were named. As a Star Trek fan I'm perfectly okay with USS Enterprise. We haven't named carriers after members of Congress since the 1960s, so that's probably a dead end.

Was Nimitz a CVN namesake because he was an admiral or because he was a naval hero? Since he's the only example, I don't think there's an objectively right answer to that question. It's probably both. But if we're going to name capital ships after naval heroes, then Dory Miller is as good a choice as any. I'll underscore your "perfectly fine" comment as at least some degree of agreement with me on that; you clearly don't personally have a problem with it. Miller was awarded the Navy Cross, the highest decoration you can receive as a sailor (surpassed only by the all-branch Medal of Honor) and one medal higher than Nimitz's highest decoration—and it was Nimitz himself who decorated Miller. Obviously Miller and Nimitz had vastly different wartime experiences. But if we can name a CVN after Carl Vinson, who wasn't a President and had no connection with the Navy, then we can certainly name one for an undisputed naval hero even if he was of humble rank.

The point of friction is that this isn't the only case of people in the Trump regime wanting to reverse "woke" ship names. It's incredibly rare to rename a ship. And doing so for such a petty reason as undoing alleged DEI is especially galling. Sec. Hegseth says he is doing it to emphasize the "warrior culture" and choosing new names from military history. However the names he's doing away with all happen to be people from minorities the current regime disfavors.

So it's perfectly reasonable to question whether the delay that might be imposed on the USS Doris Miller's entry into active service might have more to do with minority membership and less to do with "warrior culture." It's hard for me to imagine how someone who drags his wounded captain to safety and then mans a gun in the absence of qualified gunners to defend his ship under heavy fire doesn't fully exemplify "warrior culture." I realize I'm being a bit melodramatic. We don't know if that's the "real" reason for removing EMALS. But I detect a whiff of foulness afoot in the Navy, and as someone who holds tremendous respect for the U.S. Navy and its members, I'm a little concerned.
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Give them Culture names like the USS Viable Alternative to Deescalation, or the USS Gracefully-Phrased Rebuke.
 
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JayUtah said:
Under this regime that's a possibility. The carrier in question is the USS Doris Miller, a ship notably named for the African American mess steward Dory Miller who distinguished himself at Pearl Harbor by manning a machine gun and attempting to shoot down enemy airplanes—something that he had not been trained to do and which put him in mortal danger. The right has been seething at the thought of a Ford-class aircraft carrier being named after a Black man. Because renaming the ship is still a political third rail, tying the Miller up indefinitely for a refit and not letting it take to sea would seem in line. Originally the justification for the seethe was that Ford-class carriers should only be named for U.S. Presidents. But then they went and named one Enterprise, so no.
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Miller was a real hero and the Navy is rightfully proud that he was a member of that service. He got the Navy Cross for his actions and honestly should have gotten the CMOH as well and been sent home to sell war bonds. Unfortunately, he died when a second aircraft carrier was shot out underneath him.

ETA: I don't have any knowledge about the different systems mentioned here, but there are a few former Navy pilots that Trump could have asked for advice including W and Mark Kelly. But of course he would never ask for advice.
 
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Ziggurat said:
The order only explicitly demands that the SecWar give him a plan for what would be involved in switching back to steam, including how long it would take and what it would cost. The executive order does not actually commit to following that plan. Whether or not they do could easily depend on how expensive and how time-consuming such a change would be.
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I can see 2 problems with this:

1) as other people have pointed out, Trump has been pushing "steam over magnets" for quite some time. There is a very good chance that Trump's bootlickers will produce a report which understates the cost of reverting to steam in order to give him cover (i.e. "they said it could be done cheaply, its not my fault it costs more"), or they will give an accurate count, and even if it is horribly expensive Trump will still push for it, because he doesn't care about bankrupting the US, but at least now he could say "we followed the rules"

2) Lets say they come up with the report giving costs, and Trump actually does the rational thing and decides "Ok, its too expensive". Case closed, right? Well, not really. The government still would have wasted thousands of taxpayer dollars to produce a useless report that could have been done via a 2 minute phone call to one of the ship designers.
 
Doesn't really matter what kind of catapult a Carrier has when it's ordered on pointless missions, leaving critical seas unprotected and requiring extra years of repairs.

US Naval readiness hasn't been this low in decades, and it will get worse.
 
Segnosaur said:
I can see 2 problems with this:

1) as other people have pointed out, Trump has been pushing "steam over magnets" for quite some time. There is a very good chance that Trump's bootlickers will produce a report which understates the cost of reverting to steam in order to give him cover (i.e. "they said it could be done cheaply, its not my fault it costs more"), or they will give an accurate count, and even if it is horribly expensive Trump will still push for it, because he doesn't care about bankrupting the US, but at least now he could say "we followed the rules"

2) Lets say they come up with the report giving costs, and Trump actually does the rational thing and decides "Ok, its too expensive". Case closed, right? Well, not really. The government still would have wasted thousands of taxpayer dollars to produce a useless report that could have been done via a 2 minute phone call to one of the ship designers.
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He will demand a new bill called the Great Steam Bill to increase the defence budget by another half trillion to cover it
 
Donald launched his Iran war with a video video talking about regime change and destroying Iran’s capabilities. Six months later the US can’t even keep the Strait of Hormuz open and Iran is destroying the capability of the US Navy without even shooting at it.
An absolutely resounding defeat.
 
Brainster said:
...there are a few former Navy pilots that Trump could have asked for advice including W and Mark Kelly. But of course he would never ask for advice.
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He will never ask, because Pres. Trump is convinced he knows more about everything than everyone. But Sen. Kelly has weighed in on the plan to say that Trump's suggestion is ludicrous. Given the animus between Kelly and Trump, I doubt Trump will give Kelly's opinion any weight.
 
He also doesn't like the designs of the new stealth ships, saying in effect that stealth ships don't need to look ugly.
 
ZiprHead said:
He also doesn't like the designs of the new stealth ships, saying in effect that stealth ships don't need to look ugly.
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Just make sure none of them sail where he can see them. Then tell him the sooper-dooper stealth tech is why they are invisible. Trump is so barking insane and easily suggestible that this should actually work.
 
It goes without saying that the proper design of warships strictly adopts the principle the form follows function. It is far more important that a warship be as deadly as possible to its enemies and as safe as possible for its sailors than it is to look like some visual ideal. Enormous amounts of engineering expertise and collective experience goes into modern warship designs. Having some wannabe dictator come in and say he wants pretty ships puts American lives at risk. But of course Pres. Trump doesn't care about anything but himself.

But beyond that, Donald Trump's aesthetic is rubbish. In architecture, his style is "Cheap 80's Crap." The notion that he gets to take an unfettered wrecking ball to our nation's capital and rebuild it to look like a gaudy faux-luxury hotel is revolting enough. The notion that he gets to build the U.S. Navy to look like ships he like when he was a kid is just dangerous.

Maybe he wants all his officers to look like Charleton Heston, Henry Fonda, and Robert Mitchum. Ironically those guys would probably be better at fighting an actual war than Pete Hegseth.
 
JayUtah said:
It goes without saying that the proper design of warships strictly adopts the principle the form follows function. It is far more important that a warship be as deadly as possible to its enemies and as safe as possible for its sailors than it is to look like some visual ideal. Enormous amounts of engineering expertise and collective experience goes into modern warship designs. Having some wannabe dictator come in and say he wants pretty ships puts American lives at risk. But of course Pres. Trump doesn't care about anything but himself.

But beyond that, Donald Trump's aesthetic is rubbish. In architecture, his style is "Cheap 80's Crap." The notion that he gets to take an unfettered wrecking ball to our nation's capital and rebuild it to look like a gaudy faux-luxury hotel is revolting enough. The notion that he gets to build the U.S. Navy to look like ships he like when he was a kid is just dangerous.

Maybe he wants all his officers to look like Charleton Heston, Henry Fonda, and Robert Mitchum. Ironically those guys would probably be better at fighting an actual war than Pete Hegseth
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The highlited made me chuckle because it was funny, and also likely true.
 
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JayUtah said:
Maybe he wants all his officers to look like Charleton Heston, Henry Fonda, and Robert Mitchum. Ironically those guys would probably be better at fighting an actual war than Pete Hegseth.
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The first two (Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda) served in WW2, while Mitchum built aircraft at Lockheed and took acting jobs in his spare time.
 
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