GAO: Half of US Navy's Amphibious Ships in Dire Condition

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The LHD-class amphibious assault ship USS Bataan in a dry dock slip at Norfolk, Va., during a regularly scheduled maintenance period on 18 Nov. (USN photo by Mass Communication Spec. 2nd Class Bradley Rickard.)

The readiness of the USN fleet of 32 amphibious warfare ships, which are deemed crucial in quickly projecting US power around the world, is in dire shape, according to a scathing report issued this month by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The rapid deployment force used by the USMC to quickly reach and come ashore in global hot spots is so compromised by a backlog of maintenance that fully half of its ships were in poor operating condition as of March 2024.



The GAO reported that only two of the USN's seven LHD amphibious assault vessels were in satisfactory material condition.



US Marines of the 15th MEU “bear crawl” during a Black Belt USMC Martial Arts course aboard the USS Pearl Harbor, an LSD-class “small deck” amphibious vessel, on 25 Dec 2017. (USMC Photo: CPL F. Cordoba).

No doubt Beijing has already digested this GAO report and will be monitoring USN readiness of its amphibious fleet with its “thousand grains of sand” approach to intelligence collection.



Besides an outright military invasion of Taiwan, Beijing can blockade the island republic with its much larger navy, cut its underseas cables, and quarantine Taipei into submission.

Sources:

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2024/12/23/navy-amphibious-ships-poor-condition-GAO/8871734631881/

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-106728.pdf

[nitpicked]

1. The amphibs were always the red-haired stepchildren when it came to material condition

Even back in the 1990s.

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2. Agreed.

When a friend of mine became a USN dentist, I advised him to take extra good care of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children (USMC) for similar reasons.