Trump Orders the Navy to Rip Electromagnetic Catapults Out of Its Next Carrier and Open Warship Construction to Foreign Shipyards

An August 13, 2026 presidential memorandum directs the Secretary of War to deliver within 60 days a plan to replace the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System and the Advanced Weapons Elevators with steam and hydraulic systems on the carrier CVN-81. It also invokes 10 U.S.C. 8679(b) to apply what it calls the Finland Model, drawn from a 2025 icebreaker agreement, to as many as three ship classes. Under it, a foreign supplier may build the first two ships of a class abroad only if it also builds or buys a U.S. shipyard, hires American workers, licenses its techniques and sources a domestic supply chain.

Waiving the statutory bar on building Navy ships in foreign yards is a substantial departure from decades of domestic-sourcing policy, and it sits alongside a directive stripping the Navy of authority to change mature designs without approval from the Secretary of War.

The memorandum further orders plans for a fifth public Navy shipyard sited near the Pacific Fleet, a component repair center for the submarine industrial base, and a review of Naval Sea Systems Command with results-based accountability for its leadership. Congress must be notified 30 days before any contract issued under the foreign-shipyard waiver.