Amphibious Shell Game

As we know, the Navy considers ship maintenance to be a low priority task and even that may be underestimating their disinterest in maintenance.  I truly believe that the Navy’s philosophy is that the quicker the ships wear out, the sooner the Navy can justify new ships to Congress thereby securing – or, dare they hope … increasing? – their budget slice.  The astounding part of this is that the demonstrated lack of interest includes ships the Navy actually wants: surface warships. 
 
Worse than the lack of interest in maintenance, there is a major chunk of the fleet that the Navy doesn’t really want and that is amphibious ships.  They offer nothing for the Navy; they’re purely to mollify the whining of the Marine Corps to Congress.  Thus, the Navy has even less interest in providing maintenance for amphibious ships.  Here’s some notes from a GAO report, as described in a Breaking Defense website article.[1]
 

Half of the Navy ships the Marine Corps would use to make amphibious assaults are in “poor condition,” and some of the vessels have been unavailable for operational or training use for years at a time, according to a pointed new watchdog report.[1]
 
… the report found that as of March this year, nine of the Navy’s 10 dock landing ships were in “poor material condition,” as were five of the seven amphibious assault ships and two of the 13 amphibious transport docks.[1]

Am I being fair and factual in suggesting that the Navy has little interest in amphibious ships and even less interest in maintaining them?  Well, let’s see what the report has to say.
 

The report notes several factors that contributed to the problem, including “challenges with spare parts.” But a summary of the report also noted that in order to “save money, the Navy proposed early retirement for some ships and cancelled critical maintenance on them.[1][emphasis added]

Here’s another damning tidbit.
 

The Navy partially concurred with the GAO recommendation that the Navy update its amphibious ship depot maintenance policy “to clarify that, absent operational needs, the Navy should not cancel depot maintenance for amphibious ships proposed for divestment that have yet to reach the end of their expected service life.”[1]

This demonstrates that the Navy has been cancelling depot maintenance for operational ships merely because they’ve been put forward for early retirement.  This is a self-fulfilling prophecy type of situation.  You propose a ship be retired early so you halt maintenance on it.  Then, after a few years you report that the ship needs to be retired early because it would cost too much to bring it up to maintenance standards.  Quite a racket, huh?
 
How does the Navy justify this blatant failure to properly maintain active ships?
 

… the Navy said it’s currently “prohibited by law” from modifying vessels destined for the boneyard, and waivers to do so have a narrow timeline. “However, the statute permits normal Hull, Mechanical, and Electrical (HM&E) work within the five-year window prior to a ship being removed from service. The Navy will schedule this work, including depot-level repair as necessary, to maintain the ship in operational condition.” It also noted the Navy Secretary may grant waivers for that statute in the “national security interests” of the US.[1]

Note the use of waivers?  Those keep cropping up in all types of deplorable situations, don’t they?  And yet we keep handing them out like candy.
 
The Navy clearly has no interest in amphibious ships and uses every machination they can think of to avoid spending maintenance money on them.  This is criminal mishandling of the taxpayer’s investment.
 
 
 
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[1]Breaking Defense website, “Half of Navy’s amphibious fleet in ‘poor condition,’ some ships out for years, GAO warns”, Lee Ferran, 3-Dec-2024,
https://breakingdefense.com/2024/12/half-of-navys-amphibious-fleet-in-poor-condition-some-ships-out-for-years-gao-warns/