April 15, 2025: On February 12th the aircraft carrier Truman (CVN-75) received a small gash in its hull and damage to its right side aircraft elevator when it collided with a merchant ships while approaching the Suez Canal. The Truman went to a port in the Mediterranean where it could have the damage repaired.

This wouldn’t have happened if the May 2019 retirement announcement of the Truman had been carried out. This was to save the cost of its mid-life upgrade and refueling of the nuclear reactors. The mid-life upgrade will cost $3.5 billion and takes five years to complete. At that point, Truman would be able to operate another 25 years. That would cost $20 billion. By retiring the Truman the navy would save about $24 billion over 30 years and that money would be used to build new, smaller, ships and buy new weapons. Retiring Truman would also allow the navy to order and build two new Ford class CVNs at once, which would save time and money. The decision to keep Truman in service was not about money, but the fact that the new Ford class CVNs were facing major problems with launching and recovering aircraft and somewhat less desperate problems with its new radar and some other mechanical systems. Keeping the Truman was also about the seemingly intractable problems the navy has building ships and developing new designs. Keeping the Truman is seen as a positive move towards fixing some fundamental management problems.

The Ford class has become a major crisis. In February 2018 the navy confirmed that it had major problems with the design and construction of its new EMALS Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System catapult installed in its latest aircraft carrier; the USS Ford (CVN 78) and the three other Ford-class carriers under construction. During sea trials, the Ford used EMALS heavily, as would be the case in combat and training operations and found EMALS less reliable than the older steam catapult. EMALS was also more labor intensive to operate and put more stress on launched aircraft than expected. Worse, due to a basic design flaw, if one EMALS catapult becomes inoperable, the other three catapults could not be used in the meantime as was the case with steam catapults. This meant that the older practice of taking one or more steam catapults offline for maintenance or repairs while at sea was not practical. The navy admitted that in combat if one or more catapults were rendered unusable, they remained that way until it was possible to shut down all four catapults for repairs. During the initial at-sea tests the EMALS failed once every 75 aircraft launches. The standard for steam catapults is one failure every 4,166 launches. The landing and recovery system also had reliability problems, failing once every 76 landings, which is far below the standard of one failure per 16,500 landings. In effect, these problems with launching and recovering aircraft make the Fords much less effective than the older Truman and other Nimitz class CVNs. The navy has long had a growing problem with developing new ships and technology and the Ford is the worst example to date. With no assurance as to when and to what extent the launch and recovery systems would be fixed and be at least as effective as the older steam catapults. the navy was overruled and told to keep the Truman.

The navy also asked for another delay in performing mandated shock tests for the Ford, in which controlled explosions were set off near the hull that generated at least 66 percent of the amount of force the ship was designed to handle. This would reveal what equipment was not sufficiently built or installed to handle shock and make changes as well as confirming that the hull can handle the stress overall. The navy wants to wait until the second Ford-class carrier enters service in 2024 because, it admits, it is unsure how badly shock tests would damage new systems and design features. Meanwhile, there are some other major shortcomings with the Fords, including the radars, some of the elevators and a few other mechanical systems. But none of these are as serious as the malfunctioning catapults. Progress is being made in improving the reliability of the new launch and recovery system but such progress has been very slow and there is no convincing plan to achieve parity with steam catapult systems any time soon.

Some of the problems with EMALS were of the sort that could be fixed while the new ship was in service. That included tweaking EMALS operation to generate less stress on aircraft and modifying the design of EMALS and reorganizing how sailors use the system to attain the smaller number of personnel required for catapult operations. But the fatal flaws involved reliability. An EMALS catapult was supposed to have a breakdown every 4,100 launches but even after some initial fixes, in heavy use, EMALS actually failed every 400 launches. By the end of 2017, the Navy concluded that an EMALS equipped carrier had only a seven percent chance of successfully completing a typical four-day surge with multiple catapult launches for a major combat operation and only a 70 percent chance of completing a one-day surge operation. That was mainly because when one EMALS catapult went down, all four were inoperable. In effect, the Ford-class carriers are much less capable of performing in combat than their predecessors. The navy eventually came up with modifications to EMALS that fixed these problems.

This EMALS catastrophe was avoidable and the problems should have been detected and taken care of before the Ford was on sea trials. Back in 2010, the U.S. Navy plan to equip future aircraft carriers with electromagnetic catapults seemed like a great idea and everyone seemed assured that all was proceeding according to plan. This was especially true after EMALS passed some key tests in 2010. This included the first time an EMALS catapult launched an F-18E carrier jet fighter. This was from a land base equipped with the test version of EMALS. Earlier in 2010 tests had been put on hold for a bit while software problems were fixed. The mechanical aspects of the electromagnetic catapult were believed pretty much solved but the test model the navy was working with has been having some serious problems with the control software. In the midst of all this, there was no mention of the key problems, like being able to repair one catapult while the other three kept working. This had been a key feature of steam catapults for a long time and what is really scary here is that no one caught it.

With the 2010 decision, the plan to put electromagnetic catapults into all future carriers, beginning with the Ford, went ahead and apparently serious criticism of real problems was no longer an option. This was a great relief at the time because the Ford was under construction and a massive and expensive redesign would be needed to make room for the bulkier steam catapult.

The EMALS disaster calls into question the ability of the navy to handle new, untried, technologies. That is not a new problem and has been around since World War II. In retrospect, not enough was done to test and address what are now obvious problems. The current solution is to delay the moment of truth as long as possible and then conclude that it was unclear exactly how it happened but that measures would be taken to see that it never happen again. That approach is wearing thin because more people are well aware that is just a cover for the corruption and mismanagement that has been developing within the industries that build warships. The navy has been having a growing number of similar problems with the design of the LCS, the DDG 1000 and a lot of smaller systems.

Meanwhile, there is a critical need for new carriers. The first ship of the new class of carriers, the Ford is about the same length of 333 meters and displacement of 100,000 tons as the previous generation of Nimitz class ships, but will look different. The most noticeable difference will be the island being set closer to the stern/rear of the ship. The internal differences are much more obvious, including the power generation and electrical system. The Nimitz ships were rapidly wearing out and with the EMALS disaster, the Navy will have to improvise and do without for a decade or more.

The Fords were not just replacements for the aging Nimitz class; they were designed to be cheaper to operate. There is a lot more automation and smaller crews. The Ford will be the first modern American warship built without urinals. There are several reasons for this. The Ford will have a 20 percent smaller crew and more of them will be women. Currently, about ten percent of American warship crews are presently women, but the Ford crew will be at least 15 percent female. Since women sleep in all-female berthing areas, a toilet was attached to each berthing area. Moreover, berthing areas will be more spacious because of the smaller crew and hold a third to half as many bunks as previous carriers. Finally, drainpipes for urinals more frequently get clogged than those coming from toilets, so eliminating the urinals means less work for the plumbers. There are a lot of other visible changes to enhance habitability and make long voyages more tolerable. All that will have to be changed somewhat, at least in the Ford, and perhaps in others of this new class if EMALS cannot be fixed.

Before the EMALS crisis, the Ford was expected to cost nearly $14 billion. About 40 percent of that is for designing the first ship of the class, so the actual cost of the first ship CVN 78 itself will be at least $9 billion and about the same for subsequent ships of the class. Except, that is, for the additional cost of fixing the EMALS problems. Against this, the navy expected to reduce the carrier's lifetime operating expenses by several billion dollars because of greatly reduced crew size. Compared to the current Nimitz class carriers, which cost over $5 billion each to build the Fords will feel, well, kind of empty because of the automation and smaller crews. There will also be more computer networking, and robots, reducing the number of people constantly moving around inside a Nimitz class carrier with its crew of 6,000. The most recent Nimitz class ships have a lot of this automation already but adding EMALS was considered too expensive because of the major engineer changes to the power plant and electrical systems. A lot of that is subject to change depending on what internal alterations are required to make the carrier work at least as well as the Nimitz class. So far that has turned out to be a lot more difficult than anyone expected.