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President Donald Trump has ordered a major redesign of U.S. aircraft carriers to revert to a steam catapult system for launching fighter jets, a change expected to cost billions of dollars in order to use technology that’s more than 15 years out of date.

In a presidential memorandum signed on Thursday, Trump ordered the Navy to remove the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) from the newest class of aircraft carriers, the Gerald R. Ford class, and instead use the older steam powered catapults that system replaced. The change would affect the fourth ship in the class, the Doris Miller, as well as other ships yet to be built.

Trump has long fixated on steam catapults and has frequently brought up his idea to dispose of the electromagnetic system, which dates back to his first presidential term. His reasoning is unclear — but appears to simply stem from his inability to understand how EMALS works.

In an interview with TIME in 2017, Trump railed against the “digital catapult system,” recounting an encounter with a soldier who told him that the system was “not good,” but that the steam is also “just brutal.”

“It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be........

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