Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

Trump's Military Ignorance Steams Full Speed Ahead

A Q-and-A with "Ghost Fleet" author Peter W. Singer about the president's misguided criticisms of the Ford Class supercarrier.

May 15, 2017 at 12:30 PM UTC

By Tobin Harshaw

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

Packs an analog wallop.
Source: U.S. Navy via Getty Images

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"You're going to goddamned steam”! Of all Donald Trump's fascinating, shocking and downright uninformed quotes over the past week, that one may have gotten lost in the shuffle. But among defense wonks, the president's harsh judgment of the electromagnetic launch systems on the new Ford Class supercarrier was perhaps the most egregious.

Trump, in a Time Magazine interview, was describing a conversation in which he asked why the Navy was switching away from the steam-powered catapults it had used for decades, and whether the new electromagnetic launch system was working. Apparently he did not get a persuasive answer. “They have digital," he added. "What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out.”