Sequestration...

Is STILL biting the Navy in the butt...

Nearly half of the amphibious warfare ships Marines need to deploy often are unavailable due to maintenance, according to a government watchdog. How the Navy currently manages those repairs means jarheads will continue to deploy late to the fight.

The Dec. 3 Government Accountability Office report, which detailed an audit from April 2023 to December 2024 at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, and Naval Base San Diego, California, provided a decade’s worth of data regarding underperforming amphibious warfare ships.

In the report, Marine Corps data from 2011 to 2020 showed that the specific class of ships were available for operational tasks only 46% of the time.

Full article HERE from Navy Times.

Amphibs have always been 'second hand' children of the surface community, not a premier CO billet. And they have historically been rode hard and put up wet, spending a lot of time underway, with limited maintenance availabilities.

Half of the amphib fleet is not expected to make it to their service life, even with maintenance, but all of the fleet have to exceed their service life to maintain the current minimum amphib support requirements. Also, a revision to the 'availability' rules when in maintenance have resulted in more ships being put in a not capable of going to sea classification.

When sequestration hit with a vengence in 2013, they fell even further behind in maintenance, and the class replacement ships slid two or more years further out on construction. Also, you have to add in the administration's distaste for using Marines as the striking force they are, so they spent a lot of time on 'float' at sea with no real mission.

Now, with maintenance periods running longer and longer due to the amount of work required to get ALL of the fleet back to basic capabilities, and lack of shipyards capable of doing the work, I cannot see any way for this situation to improve any time soon...

Grrrr...