Will Trump's weird obsession break the US Navy?

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln have spent more than 250 consecutive days at sea without a single port call, a new US Navy record. Leaked photos show broken toilets and meals of mystery mush, the result of being trapped on the wrong side of Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But the real story is much bigger. The Navy's next-generation carriers were built around untested electromagnetic catapults that took over a decade and billions more than planned to get working, contributing to a shipbuilding backlog linked to a spike in sailor suicides. Now Donald Trump, who's long hated electric catapults, wants to switch back to old-fashioned steam, a call engineers say could make the mess a whole lot worse. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Matt Bevan?

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  And I'm Carrington Clark. From Monday to Thursday on ABC Business Daily, we break down the biggest stories in business, finance and the economy and why they matter.

• 0:27Matt Bevan?

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• 0:41Matt Bevan?

  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uwabikal and Gadigal people. The crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier are used to being in the news. In 2003, President George W. Bush paid them a visit while they were stationed in the Persian Gulf.

• 1:04Matt Bevan?

  As he stood at a podium on the Lincoln's flight deck, a giant banner reading "Mission Accomplished" was visible on the bridge structure behind him.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Because of you, our nation is more secure.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Because of you, the tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free.

• 1:25Matt Bevan?

  The reason the crew of the Lincoln was so excited was that Bush had ordered them to return home to the US after nine months at sea. It had been a long, grueling mission, but fortunately for the crew, the stretches at sea were interspersed with nine stops in various ports to resupply and give the sailors some shore leave. It meant that the crew never spent more than 91 consecutive days at sea without a rest. 23 years later, the situation is very different.

• 1:58Speaker 04

  There are growing concerns for US Navy personnel aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea for 250 consecutive days after reports of supply shortages and poor mental health.

• 2:11Matt Bevan?

  As of the end of August, the Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for the same amount of time as the deployment back in 2003, but this time they've had no shore leave at all. It's a US Navy record for most consecutive days at sea.

• 2:28Speaker 05

  Normally, we get a port call on a ship during a deployment every two months, maybe. And so now they've gone about eight months without going into port at all.

• 2:38Matt Bevan?

  So why has that ship been stuck out there for so long? Well, it's because of some very important ocean news that went down earlier this year.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  The Strait of Hormuz is a crucial sea corridor off Iran's south coast, but it's been practically shut down.

• 2:55Matt Bevan?

  Despite the USS Abraham Lincoln's best efforts, it is stuck on the eastern side of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The blockade is also blockading them from their own resupply ports.

• 3:08Speaker 05

  They go to Bahrain, they go to Fujairah and pick it up and then bring it back out to the ship. Well, they can't do that because they can't access the Strait of Hormuz.

• 3:15Matt Bevan?

  Not only has the crew been stuck at sea, but the nearest supply base they can use is 3,500 kilometres away in Diego Garcia. That distance has led to shortages.

• 3:29Speaker 05

  Morale on a ship depends on the food, it depends on whether you have access to the toiletries that you're used to having, so toothpaste, soap and just simple stuff like that, that if you don't have them, it really starts to grind on you when you add that to the workload and then the operational tempo they're maintaining.

• 3:46Matt Bevan?

  The families of sailors have been sharing information and photos showing the grim conditions on board.

• 3:52Speaker 06

  Thousands of US military members are reportedly contending with food shortages, broken plumbing and exhaustion as the Iran war continues. Military outlets are reporting that multiple sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have considered jumping overboard.

• 4:07Matt Bevan?

  There are photos of the tiny food portions and mystery meat mush being served to the crew, along with pictures of filthy bathrooms. Look at the toilet, y'all expect me to take a doo doo in this, y'all? Nah, got crazy. Many of the toilets are overflowing with human doo doo. Now, the Trump administration denies that there is a problem. That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it's being replaced with another very similar ship. When asked if its deployment has gone on too long, the president said... No, no, no, not nearly long enough.

• 4:46Matt Bevan?

  The Lincoln is now on its way to Thailand, where the sailors will reportedly be given the shore leave for the first time since, like, before any of the Epstein files were released. But the thing is, the story about the Lincoln being stuck at sea for so long is actually indicative of a much wider problem with the US Navy.

• 5:13Matt Bevan?

  A growing crisis is emerging in the yards that build the ships and submarines that the Navy needs to be the global ocean police. They are years behind schedule in both building new ships and maintaining the old ones, and it's set to get a lot worse. Now, you might be thinking, what could that guy's inability to doo doo on his hellship mean for my safety here in Australia? And well, I do have a surprise for you on that front. I'm Matt Bevan and this is If You're Listening.

• 5:52Matt Bevan?

  So, the modern American aircraft carrier isn't a regular military boat. It's actually more like a small city. It has upwards of 5,000 crew, supermarkets, some of them even have Starbucks coffee shops. We're all surprised that we actually have a Starbucks, that it actually tastes like Starbucks and the prices are cheaper than regular. The first carrier built like this was the USS Forrestal back in the 1950s. Over 6,000 plans were needed to build this ship. The Forrestal was built in the city of Newport News, Virginia. That job took thousands of men, more nearly 5,000 workers on the ship itself from 40 different trades to meet her production schedule.

• 6:34Matt Bevan?

  As the Forrestal took shape in Newport News shipbuilding company's dry dock 11, some slightly unexpected features were installed. Through access openings left clear in the hull, her powerful steam turbines and reduction gears were lowered, the giant boilers, two, eight of them. Back in the 1950s, big new cargo ships were usually built with diesel engines, but this enormous, modern Navy ship was being built with a more powerful but much less efficient oil-powered steam engine. Why? Well, they were going to use the steam the ship created for other things. These to deliver steam for the ship's turbines and to launch her planes.

• 7:20Matt Bevan?

  To launch her planes. See, the Forrestal was being built to accommodate launching jet planes.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Well, jet planes, bigger and heavier jobs, greater ranges, more fuel, guess it all adds up.

• 7:33Matt Bevan?

  These steam-powered catapults were a big upgrade on the old system.

• 7:38Speaker 06

  The steam catapult has increased launching power over six times that of the old hydraulic systems.

• 7:44Matt Bevan?

  The Forrestal would have four of them.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  She's got two catapults forward and two on the angle, port side, they'll be steamed too. With that setup, they ought to get a bunch of planes in the air in record time.

• 7:55Matt Bevan?

  The elevators that bring the planes and bombs up from underneath the deck would be steam-powered too, so would the heating, laundry and a lot of the kitchen equipment. Servicing all of this meant that the ship would need to have a massive circulatory system of steam pipes. They are a part of the ship's vitals, providing a sensitive and balanced mechanism which makes her, in performance, a living organism. Despite the huge amount of very complex equipment, the Forrestal only took three years to build.

• 8:28Speaker 07

  The world's mightiest naval vessel, a 59,000-tonne supercarrier Forrestal, is ready at her Newport News, Virginia dock for a five-day shakedown cruise prior to going into commission. 40,000 people could stand on her enormous flight deck.

• 8:42Matt Bevan?

  The USS Forrestal was the largest and most luxurious naval vessel in history. All birthing spaces for the entire crew are air-conditioned. Each compartment... Is accommodated with a recreation area with tables and chairs for writing letters or reading. It could carry up to a hundred jet aircraft, arm them, launch them, and then launch more of them while others were landing at the back of the ship. Bombs, missiles, rockets, and fuel were all kept separate until the last moment, or at least that's how it's meant to work. See, 12 years after the USS Forrester launched, things stopped going to plan.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  We were preparing for an Alpha Strike and there was a large number of airplanes and I was in mine, had started the engine, was going through the engine checks.

• 9:38Matt Bevan?

  This is US Senator John McCain, who on the 29th of July 1967 was on the deck of the Forrester in his fighter jet, preparing for a mission.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Across the flight deck for me was an F4 Phantom and on the Phantom wings were Zuni rockets, which are long, six-foot-long rockets.

• 9:58Matt Bevan?

  The way the Zuni rockets work is they're mounted onto the bottom of the wings of the jet on the deck, and then a small electrical wire they call a pigtail is plugged in.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  An electrical impulse fires, goes through that and fires the rocket. Well, that pigtail, as it's called, is not supposed to be inserted until the airplane is on the catapult facing the water.

• 10:21Matt Bevan?

  The reason it's not plugged in until the last second is because when the jet engine starts, it sometimes sends a surge of electricity through the whole plane. And if the pigtail's plugged in, that surge can set off the rocket, which is exactly what happened on this particular day.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  A very large charge of stray electricity went through the pigtail and fired the Zuni rocket across the flight deck, punched through the fuel tank, the 200-gallon fuel tank that was underneath my A4 Skyhawk.

• 10:55Matt Bevan?

  This was all captured by a camera that was on the deck of the Forrester that day. In the footage, you can see planes being catapulted off the deck as usual, but then the person operating the camera whips around to the back of the ship, and you can see an enormous fire.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  In a very short period of time, there was a huge conflagration on the Forrester. Fire, fire, fire, fire on the flight deck, fire on the flight deck, all hands, hang

• 11:22Matt Bevan?

  your battle flag, all hands, hang your battle flag. As the firefighting crews rushed to the site, the bombs loaded onto the planes started exploding. Fuel was pouring through holes in the flight deck caused by the continuous 1,000-pound bomb explosion. Fire burned for hours and killed 135 sailors. Sadly, this wasn't an isolated incident. Around the same time, two more fires were sparked by similar technical issues on two other ships, and more sailors were killed. Something clearly needed to change. So when it was time for the team at the Newport News Shipbuilding Company to build the next generation of aircraft carriers, significant changes were made to improve the safety of the crew.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  The world's largest, most expensive warship, USS Nimitz, a brand-new, billion-dollar giant slipping powerfully across the North Sea. Nimitz is enormous, a shipload of superlatives, 1,100 feet long and over 250 wide.

• 12:26Matt Bevan?

  The oil-fired boiler had been replaced with a boiler heated by nuclear reactors, but the blood of the ship was still steam.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Above, the action's beginning, fast and fuming as the steam of a launch catapult mingles with unburnt fuel from full-power takeoff.

• 12:46Matt Bevan?

  Every video that you've ever seen of planes launching off an aircraft carrier is full of steam. The first five minutes of Top Gun are very steamy, and I don't just mean the sexual tension between Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise, I mean literal steam. You can be my wingman anytime. Adjusted for inflation, the Nimitz cost four and a half times more than the Forrester, but the innovative design and safety features of this floating steam-powered airport were so good that the US Navy ordered nine more just like it. And from that point on, that's just how aircraft carriers worked, with steam, all the way up until the turn of the century.

• 13:27Matt Bevan?

  The Navy started planning the next generation of warships that would replace the Nimitz. The design had served them well. While there had been accidents, there had been no mass casualty events like the ones seen in the 1960s. The reason the ships needed an update was because there had been big updates in military technology. The potential for new types of weapons led Navy bosses to make fundamental changes to the way the carriers worked, starting with the steam.

• 14:00Matt Bevan?

  To change the type of launch system we have, the catapults, to a new type of catapult system, which will be much more effective and much less maintenance, as opposed to the steam-powered catapults that we have today. Okay, so no more steam catapults. They're called electromagnetic catapults, and they're very similar in the way they operate to today's modern-day rollercoaster systems. When a modern rollercoaster needs to get up a big hill, it doesn't just ratchet up slowly. The train sits on a flat track with a sequence of magnets running along it. When it's time to start the ride, the magnets switch on in sequence, one after the other, accelerating the train up to top speed very quickly.

• 14:47Matt Bevan?

  The naval engineers wanted the jets onboard the aircraft carriers to take off using the same magnet technology. The thing is, this process uses an enormous amount of electricity, more even than the Nimitz's two nuclear reactors could generate. It meant that to have this electromagnetic technology, ships would need to be totally redesigned. We will have a redesigned nuclear power plant, which will be much less manpower-intensive to operate, and we will have a new electrical generating capability that will be about two and a half times what we currently have on the Nimitz. So instead of a giant circulatory system of steam pipes going through the entire

• 15:27Matt Bevan?

  carrier, these new ships would have a colossal nuclear power plant onboard, generating enormous amounts of electricity, which could then be used to power the magnet-powered catapults. They're experimenting with the forces of electromagnetism, and the focus of their work is the EML, the electromagnetic rail launcher, commonly called the railgun. The railgun. It's a gun that uses magnets to just kind of yeet bullets over the horizon.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  It's a new kind of gun that doesn't use gunpowder like we have for 800 years, but it literally uses magnetism, and it is a cannon that'll be able to sling a shell over 100 miles.

• 16:09Matt Bevan?

  So the plan was to basically pull out all the steam pipes and boilers to make room for whatever new high-tech electric weapons the Navy was able to get working. The company behind all of this engineering was called General Atomics. General Atomics does a lot of unique and interesting things, and one of the things that we work with is a lot of electricity and magnetism. General Atomics was behind almost all of the cool new stuff being added to these next-generation warships. The giant nuclear power plant, the electromagnetic catapult, the railgun, they were also the developer of the Predator drone, which was growing in importance to the US military.

• 16:48Matt Bevan?

  The military was so excited by their plans that in 2005, General Atomics and the folks at Newport News Shipyard began work on the first all-electric aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford. More than a decade later, Senator John McCain chaired a congressional hearing to check up on how things were going with the construction, and the situation was not good.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  The Ford class program is currently estimated to be more than $6 billion over budget, and yet, when I asked the former chief of naval operations who's responsible for the cost overrun on the USS Gerald R. Ford, he said he didn't know.

• 17:30Matt Bevan?

  So the Forrester took three years to build, right? The Ford was 13 years in and still not done. Senator McCain thought that he might have an idea about what the issue was.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  They decided to develop concurrently and integrate onto one ship all at once, a host of advanced and entirely unproven technologies. This was the original sin, in my view, that so damaged this program.

• 17:56Matt Bevan?

  Yep, so the electromagnetic catapults weren't working properly and had never been successfully used at sea. The laser weapons could shoot down a small drone as long as it wasn't moving around too much, and the cool railgun, it tore itself apart after 100 or so shots and needed to be replaced. So the ship was years overdue and set to cost more than $12 billion, but it was at least getting close. In 2017, two years after McCain gave the Ford a verbal broadside, 15 years after development started, it was ready for commissioning.

• 18:36Matt Bevan?

  The US president decided to pop into the shipyard at Newport News for a visit. It is a high honor to introduce and welcome the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

• 18:57Matt Bevan?

  The president was given the grand tour. He was shown the flight deck, and then he was taken down one of the aircraft elevators into the hangar. This is how he recounts what happened on that tour. So I get to the boat. How's it go? Well, it's okay, sir, but we have a little problem with the catapult system. You know, that's not like so good. We have an aircraft carrier, you can't send planes off the damn thing. For whatever reason, Trump decided to investigate this further. I said, let me see the catapult people. They said, sir, you don't really want to do that. I said, yeah, those are the people that know what the hell they're doing. So I get the catapult guys, five guys come over. Yes, sir. And I said, so what do you do? He said, I'm a catapulter.

• 19:42Matt Bevan?

  20 years. Yes, sir. What would you like to know, sir? Very simple question. What's better? An electric catapult or steam? Sir, steam is better. I said it's better. If the steam breaks, I can fix it myself with a wrench. If the electronics breaks, sir, we have to send for Albert Einstein to try and fix it. In fact, when Trump visited in March 2017, the crew of the Gerald R Ford had not yet managed to launch and recover a single fighter jet using its catapult system.

• 20:27Matt Bevan?

  Now, learning about the electromagnetic versus steam thing, Trump became absolutely fixated on this problem. Every time he was talking to someone from the Navy, he would bring it up. This poor guy, Captain Pat Hanifin, had to deal with this question from Trump during a Thanksgiving call.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Would you go with steam or would you go with electromagnetic? Because steam is very reliable.

• 20:53Matt Bevan?

  Sir, Mr. President, I would go electromagnetic cat.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Okay, good. We do pay a heavy cost for transiting the steam around the ship. Okay, I like to hear that. I'm actually happy about that answer because at least, you know, they're doing what they're doing, but that's actually a very good answer.

• 21:12Matt Bevan?

  Look, this is genuinely a very tricky problem. What Captain Hanifin is saying is that the steam system with all the pipes and boilers, it takes up basically half the ship. He's saying if they can get the electric system working, it will be better because it's smaller and can be adjusted to launch lots of different types of aircraft. A few months after Trump's visit, the Ford launch catapult worked for the first time. The crew were absolutely pumped, but it took another six years to get the system working well enough to actually put the ship into active service.

• 21:56Matt Bevan?

  The delays with the Ford caused absolute chaos at the Newport News shipyard. Not only was their shipbuilding schedule running years late, but their maintenance schedule for the existing carriers was a mess too. In late 2021, the yard was dealing with five carriers simultaneously, two new ones, two being refueled and refitted, and one being scrapped. One of the ships being refitted at the yard, the USS George Washington, was the scene of crisis. Before a ship is launched, aircraft carrier crews are ordered to move aboard the ship

• 22:37Matt Bevan?

  a few months beforehand, so they're fully ready to go when it comes time to set sail. The crew of the George Washington was ordered aboard in mid 2021, but the ship was nowhere near ready. In fact, it was still entirely under construction. For months, the crew was forced to live in whatever bits of the ship weren't under construction at the time, trying to sleep through constant drilling and hammering noise. In the end, the consequences for this were devastating.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  The warship has been docked in Virginia since 2017 for a major overhaul, but in the last year, seven sailors assigned to it have died, four of them apparent suicides.

• 23:19Matt Bevan?

  Three of the five deaths happened in the span of a week in April 2022. In the end, the four-year refit of the Washington took six years. The crew had been ordered aboard two years early. The point is, the entire system is in chaos. Everything is taking years longer than it should and it costs billions of dollars more. The carrier we're hearing about now, the USS Abraham Lincoln, has been stuck out there off the coast of Iran because until very recently, there was no other ship available to relieve it. That's how we get those pictures of the mystery mush meals and what looks like sewage shooting out of a sink.

• 24:02Matt Bevan?

  Decisions made in the past to make these ships safer and more technologically advanced have outstripped the ability of the team at Newport News Shipbuilding to keep up with the schedule. And this is having huge knock-on consequences, not just for aircraft carriers, but for everything else that's built in that yard too. And here's where Australia comes in because guess what else they make there at that same yard?

• 24:29Speaker 00

  It's Virginia-class subs like this one that Australia is seeking to initially acquire under the AUKUS Security Pact.

• 24:38Matt Bevan?

  Australia has entered into a contract to buy a number of submarines from Newport News, and our politicians have been scoping out the facility.

• 24:48Speaker 05

  The size and the scale of the operation here at Newport News is hard to comprehend in the Australian context.

• 24:54Matt Bevan?

  In order to supply both the US and Australian navies, the team at Newport News and their partners in Connecticut need to produce 2.33 Virginia-class subs a year. They've never even come close to that. The yearly average is barely above one sub a year. So the situation at the shipyard is not great. Do you hope that nothing happens that could make it worse? President Trump directed the US Navy this week to switch back to steam catapult systems on aircraft carriers, calling them more cost-effective. Yeah, so Donald Trump is still obsessed with the steam catapults. He has in fact been talking about them constantly for nine years.

• 25:37Speaker 05

  Because they decided to use electric catapults that throws the planes off instead of steam. The steam system is tried and true for many, many years, as long as we've had aircraft carriers.

• 25:48Matt Bevan?

  I love the sight of that beautiful steam pouring off the deck with the electric. You don't have that. Steam, old fashioned, right? Old fashioned. He sometimes does it as a call and response thing at a rally. Which is better, the electric or the steam? And all along, he's been promising to revert to steam. But I like steam. We're going to go back to steam. He wants the aircraft carrier currently under construction at Newport News to be built with steam catapults instead of electric ones. But as we've been discussing, it's not a matter of just like popping one out and putting another one in. It's not like going back to wired headphones when your Bluetooth ones break.

• 26:28Matt Bevan?

  The old system requires the entire ship to be designed around the steam pipes. The folks at General Atomic are horrified, issuing a statement saying that changing course now will have implications for carrier readiness, national security, and US technological superiority, and cause even more delays with construction. Thing with this is, Donald Trump's not even wrong about the steam thing. After decades of development, the electromagnetic catapults are still less reliable than the old steam ones. They only switched to free up space for the sci-fi weapons that General Atomics wanted to build, none of which work reliably.

• 27:10Matt Bevan?

  It's been an incredibly expensive, slow-moving catastrophe for the US Navy. And yet Trump has clearly no idea how to fix this issue. He's making orders which will likely make a serious problem much worse and cost even more money. The slow-moving catastrophe might be about to get slower and even more catastrophic. And yet messing around with all those aircraft carriers is unlikely to make it easier for us to get those submarines. If you're listening, it's written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

• 27:53Matt Bevan?

  Audio production this week is by Anna John. A few years ago, there was a curious crime wave in India. A number of people presented to the hospital with scratches and bite marks claiming that they'd been attacked. When questioned, they all described the same perpetrator. A short, half-monkey, half-man, dressed in a monkey-sized police uniform. In short, a monkey man. So what's going on? That story's coming up on Tuesday.