Full Steam Astern

Sound general quarters.

Batten every hatch.

Secure all rational thought.

The Commander in Chief has seized the conn and ordered the United States Navy to steam backwards because the twenty-first century was showing insufficient respect for his instincts.

President Trump has directed the Navy to replace the electromagnetic aircraft-launch system planned for future Gerald R. Ford-class carriers with steam catapults.

Not because naval engineers completed an analysis.

Not because test pilots demanded it.

Not because an enemy discovered some vulnerability.

He heard a sailor praise steam a decade ago and has been nursing that anecdote like it was carved onto tablets by Admiral Nelson.

This is how a superpower now designs warships: one man hears something during a shipboard visit, remembers half of it, adds “goddamn,” and turns it into a national-security memorandum.

Steam catapults are proven technology.

So are sextants, signal flags and wooden legs.

The question is not whether steam once worked; the question is whether tearing apart ships designed around electricity makes practical sense.

The answer: negative, Captain Bone Spurs.

The Ford class was built around electromagnetic launch gear.

Spaces that held steam machinery on Nimitz-class carriers were redesigned or eliminated.

Reversing course means new piping, new machinery, new maintenance burdens, new failure points and years of integration work inside one of the most complicated objects humanity constructs.

It is like ordering a nuclear submarine converted to coal because somebody once met a reliable chimney sweep.

The Navy says Ford’s newer launch and arresting systems support higher launch-and-recovery rates than the Nimitz class.

By March, Ford’s four catapults had launched nearly 37,000 aircraft.

The ship operates with roughly 500 fewer sailors, partly because fewer technicians are required for steam equipment, and early Navy figures indicate about $100 million in lower annual operating costs.

Nevertheless: full steam astern.

The fourth carrier, the USS Doris Miller, must now be redesigned, although the contractor says work on its electromagnetic launch and arresting equipment is nearly half complete.

Billions may be burned, schedules shoved overboard, and engineering plans fed through the scuppers because the president considers technical complexity a personal insult.

Apparently a machine should be understandable to a man who believes electricity is a suspicious rumor traveling through walls.

Steam also requires miles of piping and armies of maintainers hunting leaks, valves and mechanical tantrums below decks.

Every pipe is another opportunity for Murphy’s Law to report for watch, salute smartly and flood a compartment.

Senator Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) has launched from carriers hundreds of times, holds a graduate degree in aeronautical engineering, and has worked as a test pilot.

He says even he would not presume to dictate ship-system engineering to the Navy.

That is called judgment: knowing where your expertise ends before sailors, taxpayers and national defense go over the fantail with it.

Trump’s order is not toughness.

It is nostalgia wearing scrambled eggs on its cap.

A carrier is not a casino lobby to be remodeled whenever the owner dislikes the fixtures.

It is a fighting city whose systems must operate together under fire.

At this rate, the next directive will replace radar with a lookout named Earl, nuclear propulsion with rowing benches and fighter aircraft with kites.

All hands brace for impact. The fleet is advancing toward yesterday, flank speed, while common sense abandons ship without a navigator aboard.