Failure to Launch: How Political Backpedaling Could Hand China the Carrier Edge
Failure to Launch: How Political Backpedaling Could Hand China the Carrier Edge
The MOC
By Ethan Connell, Jonathan Walberg
January 20, 2026
This November, the stakes in the global carrier competition snapped into focus. China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) officially commissioned the Fujian, its third and most advanced aircraft carrier, in a ceremony (headlined by Xi Jinping himself) highlighting the ship’s new electromagnetic catapults and the fifth-generation stealth fighters that will fly from them. In the same week, President Trump stood in the hangar deck of the USS George Washington and pledged an executive order forcing the Navy to abandon its own electromagnetic launch technology and return to steam catapults and hydraulic elevators.
Forcing future U.S. aircraft carriers to return to steam catapults would be an expensive disaster that hands China a long-term advantage at sea. To prevent that, Congress’s defense committees, the Secretary of War, and Navy leadership must lock EMALS into law, demonstrate that the system is fixable, and quietly narrow actions that drag the fleet back to 20th-century technology.
The Technology Deciding the Next War at Sea
The technical debate over catapults sounds trivial. However, moving from steam to electromagnetic aircraft launch systems (EMALS) is as consequential for carrier aviation as the shift from propellers to jets. EMALS uses powerful electromagnets to provide acceleration, rather than the steam pressure used on Nimitz-class carriers. This creates three critical advantages: finer control over launch profiles, less stress on airframes, and flexibility to handle heavier or more fragile aircraft, including unmanned systems.
This matters especially for fifth-generation fighters, which are heavier and costlier than legacy jets. China has showcased J-35 stealth fighters, J-15T strike aircraft, and KJ-600 early-warning planes launching via electromagnetic catapult from the Fujian. According to Chinese media, the ship achieved “initial full-deck operational capability” during sea trials, entering active service earlier this month.
The carrier race is not just about hull numbers; it is about who can most quickly integrate EM launch systems at scale, enabling the launch of stealth aircraft. On that learning curve, China is now climbing while the United States hesitates.
Supporters of returning to steam point to genuine problems that have plagued the Navy’s Ford-class supercarriers, especially USS Gerald R. Ford. EMALS, advanced arresting gear (AAG), and new weapons elevators have all fallen far short of initial reliability goals. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that EMALS and AAG were unlikely to meet design reliability targets until the 2030s.
Those concerns are real. They are also typical of first-of-class, high-complexity systems. Over the past several years, EMALS has improved, moving from test sites ashore to operational deployments at sea. While recent analyses address reliability shortfalls, they point to a system on an upward curve, not a dead end.
China remains far from matching U.S. carrier experience. The Fujian is conventionally powered, lacks the global endurance of America’s supercarriers, and needs years to integrate fully into carrier strike group operations. The PLAN is still building at-sea aviation proficiency the U.S. Navy has honed over decades.
However, Beijing has made a deliberate choice: it is willing to pay the price for next-generation carrier technology. Fujian’s electromagnetic catapults allow the launching of heavier, more capable aircraft than earlier ski-jump carriers, Liaoning and Shandong, which matters not just for stealth fighters like the J-35 but also for command-and-control aircraft like the KJ-600, extending the carrier’s sensor reach deep into the Western Pacific.
As Fujianbegins patrols under the Southern Theater Command and further conducts live-force training, the PLAN will build the same kind of operational knowledge the U.S. Navy is only starting to gain from Ford-class deployments: which launch profiles minimize maintenance, how to sustain tempo on long cruises and in high-intensity operations, and how to fight through failures in complex electrical systems under combat conditions.
Simply put, if the United States abandons EMALS while China does not, those lessons will compound in Beijing’s favor.
The Illusion of Going “Back to Steam”
Modern carrier designs are tightly integrated systems. Reverting to steam catapults would require a major redesign of the Ford-class hull and significant modifications to nuclear propulsion. This move could add years to construction schedules and cost billions of dollars in redesign and redevelopment, while American shipyards already struggle to keep pace with current demand.
The result would be a mixed fleet: EMALS-equipped carriers alongside redesigned steam-equipped ships. Pilots and technicians would support two incompatible launch and recovery systems for decades, splitting training, inflating spare parts inventories, and leaving commanders with uneven capability across their most expensive hulls. To allies and adversaries, the signal would be clear: the United States could not stay the course on the very technology that defines its newest supercarriers.
Staying on the Right Side of the Learning Curve
None of this means accepting EMALS as flawless. On the contrary, the reliability problems exposed on Gerald R. Ford should be treated as an urgent warning. But that warning points to fixing the technology, not abandoning it in favor of systems optimal for an earlier era.
Congress can head off the damage before it starts. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees should write into annual defense authorization and spending bills that future U.S. nuclear-powered carriers must use EMALS (or an equivalent system), not steam. This turns EMALS into the statutory baseline for carrier construction, making executive orders to “return to steam” hit funding walls and force the Pentagon to justify, in public, the cost and delay of ripping modern launch technology out of ships already being built.
The Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy should display a public assessment that a reversal means years of delay, billions in sunk costs, and a permanently split fleet, and interpret executive orders as a demand for study and mitigation, not a blueprint for tearing up carrier designs under construction.
Navy leadership can make EMALS harder to kill by treating it as a vital war-fighting system instead of a struggling engineering challenge: publish reliability curves, show how it enables unmanned aircraft the President wants, and make clear that steam forces a redesign of entire future air wings, not just flight decks.
Advocates of the executive order will argue this is common sense: steam works, EMALS has missed reliability goals, and the Navy cannot afford another failure. Lawmakers will be tempted by anything that sounds like cheaper, proven technology, especially after years of bad headlines about the Ford-class.
Those arguments understate the cost of reversal and ignore that EMALS is improving. The choice is between fixing an improving system the fleet already champions, or spending years and billions rebuilding steam-era systems that can’t support the Navy’s future aircraft.
The United States has more carriers and experience, but risks throwing away its willingness to absorb the friction of new technology. If Congress locks EMALS into law, the Pentagon narrows reversals into paperwork rather than redesign, and if the Navy improves electromagnetic launch reliability, Washington can stay ahead in the carrier race. If it does not, and future carriers are built around steam because of a campaign promise, the United States will have lost the launch race before the next generation of aircraft ever leaves the deck.
Ethan Connell is a Research Team Lead at Taiwan Security Monitor, specializing in U.S. naval operations and capabilities. He tracks American fleet movements and developments, having worked previously with the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office. His work examines Chinese maritime strategy, integrating satellite imagery and OSINT to assess surface and subsurface naval activity. Ethan holds a degree in International Politics and Security Studies from George Mason University.
Jonathan Walberg is a PhD student in International Relations and Psychology at the University of Virginia, studying China’s use of AI in disinformation and narrative warfare, as well as American military modernization. Jonathan is the Associate Director of Taiwan Security Monitor, a research initiative dedicated to improving the understanding of security dynamics in the Taiwan Strait, as well as a fellow for both the Center for Security Policy Studies and the Center for Advancing Human Machine Partnership.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.
By Ethan Connell, Jonathan Walberg
This November, the stakes in the global carrier competition snapped into focus. China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) officially commissioned the Fujian, its third and most advanced aircraft carrier, in a ceremony (headlined by Xi Jinping himself) highlighting the ship’s new electromagnetic catapults and the fifth-generation stealth fighters that will fly from them. In the same week, President Trump stood in the hangar deck of the USS George Washington and pledged an executive order forcing the Navy to abandon its own electromagnetic launch technology and return to steam catapults and hydraulic elevators.
Forcing future U.S. aircraft carriers to return to steam catapults would be an expensive disaster that hands China a long-term advantage at sea. To prevent that, Congress’s defense committees, the Secretary of War, and Navy leadership must lock EMALS into law, demonstrate that the system is fixable, and quietly narrow actions that drag the fleet back to 20th-century technology.
The Technology Deciding the Next War at Sea
The technical debate over catapults sounds trivial. However, moving from steam to electromagnetic aircraft launch systems (EMALS) is as consequential for carrier aviation as the shift from propellers to jets. EMALS uses powerful electromagnets to provide acceleration, rather than the steam pressure used on Nimitz-class carriers. This creates three critical advantages: finer control over launch profiles, less stress on airframes, and flexibility to handle heavier or more fragile aircraft, including unmanned systems.
This matters especially for fifth-generation fighters, which are heavier and costlier than legacy jets. China has showcased J-35 stealth fighters, J-15T strike aircraft, and KJ-600 early-warning planes launching via electromagnetic catapult from the Fujian. According to Chinese media, the ship achieved “initial full-deck operational capability” during sea trials, entering active service earlier this month.
The carrier race is not just about hull numbers; it is about who can most quickly integrate EM launch systems at scale, enabling the launch of stealth aircraft. On that learning curve, China is now climbing while the United States hesitates.
Supporters of returning to steam point to genuine problems that have plagued the Navy’s Ford-class supercarriers, especially USS Gerald R. Ford. EMALS, advanced arresting gear (AAG), and new weapons elevators have all fallen far short of initial reliability goals. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that EMALS and AAG were unlikely to meet design reliability targets until the 2030s.
Those concerns are real. They are also typical of first-of-class, high-complexity systems. Over the past several years, EMALS has improved, moving from test sites ashore to operational deployments at sea. While recent analyses address reliability shortfalls, they point to a system on an upward curve, not a dead end.
China remains far from matching U.S. carrier experience. The Fujian is conventionally powered, lacks the global endurance of America’s supercarriers, and needs years to integrate fully into carrier strike group operations. The PLAN is still building at-sea aviation proficiency the U.S. Navy has honed over decades.
However, Beijing has made a deliberate choice: it is willing to pay the price for next-generation carrier technology. Fujian’s electromagnetic catapults allow the launching of heavier, more capable aircraft than earlier ski-jump carriers, Liaoning and Shandong, which matters not just for stealth fighters like the J-35 but also for command-and-control aircraft like the KJ-600, extending the carrier’s sensor reach deep into the Western Pacific.
As Fujian begins patrols under the Southern Theater Command and further conducts live-force training, the PLAN will build the same kind of operational knowledge the U.S. Navy is only starting to gain from Ford-class deployments: which launch profiles minimize maintenance, how to sustain tempo on long cruises and in high-intensity operations, and how to fight through failures in complex electrical systems under combat conditions.
Simply put, if the United States abandons EMALS while China does not, those lessons will compound in Beijing’s favor.
The Illusion of Going “Back to Steam”
Modern carrier designs are tightly integrated systems. Reverting to steam catapults would require a major redesign of the Ford-class hull and significant modifications to nuclear propulsion. This move could add years to construction schedules and cost billions of dollars in redesign and redevelopment, while American shipyards already struggle to keep pace with current demand.
The result would be a mixed fleet: EMALS-equipped carriers alongside redesigned steam-equipped ships. Pilots and technicians would support two incompatible launch and recovery systems for decades, splitting training, inflating spare parts inventories, and leaving commanders with uneven capability across their most expensive hulls. To allies and adversaries, the signal would be clear: the United States could not stay the course on the very technology that defines its newest supercarriers.
Staying on the Right Side of the Learning Curve
None of this means accepting EMALS as flawless. On the contrary, the reliability problems exposed on Gerald R. Ford should be treated as an urgent warning. But that warning points to fixing the technology, not abandoning it in favor of systems optimal for an earlier era.
Congress can head off the damage before it starts. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees should write into annual defense authorization and spending bills that future U.S. nuclear-powered carriers must use EMALS (or an equivalent system), not steam. This turns EMALS into the statutory baseline for carrier construction, making executive orders to “return to steam” hit funding walls and force the Pentagon to justify, in public, the cost and delay of ripping modern launch technology out of ships already being built.
The Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy should display a public assessment that a reversal means years of delay, billions in sunk costs, and a permanently split fleet, and interpret executive orders as a demand for study and mitigation, not a blueprint for tearing up carrier designs under construction.
Navy leadership can make EMALS harder to kill by treating it as a vital war-fighting system instead of a struggling engineering challenge: publish reliability curves, show how it enables unmanned aircraft the President wants, and make clear that steam forces a redesign of entire future air wings, not just flight decks.
Advocates of the executive order will argue this is common sense: steam works, EMALS has missed reliability goals, and the Navy cannot afford another failure. Lawmakers will be tempted by anything that sounds like cheaper, proven technology, especially after years of bad headlines about the Ford-class.
Those arguments understate the cost of reversal and ignore that EMALS is improving. The choice is between fixing an improving system the fleet already champions, or spending years and billions rebuilding steam-era systems that can’t support the Navy’s future aircraft.
The United States has more carriers and experience, but risks throwing away its willingness to absorb the friction of new technology. If Congress locks EMALS into law, the Pentagon narrows reversals into paperwork rather than redesign, and if the Navy improves electromagnetic launch reliability, Washington can stay ahead in the carrier race. If it does not, and future carriers are built around steam because of a campaign promise, the United States will have lost the launch race before the next generation of aircraft ever leaves the deck.
Ethan Connell is a Research Team Lead at Taiwan Security Monitor, specializing in U.S. naval operations and capabilities. He tracks American fleet movements and developments, having worked previously with the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office. His work examines Chinese maritime strategy, integrating satellite imagery and OSINT to assess surface and subsurface naval activity. Ethan holds a degree in International Politics and Security Studies from George Mason University.
Jonathan Walberg is a PhD student in International Relations and Psychology at the University of Virginia, studying China’s use of AI in disinformation and narrative warfare, as well as American military modernization. Jonathan is the Associate Director of Taiwan Security Monitor, a research initiative dedicated to improving the understanding of security dynamics in the Taiwan Strait, as well as a fellow for both the Center for Security Policy Studies and the Center for Advancing Human Machine Partnership.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.