The Navy’s amphibious fleet is in such a sorry state that half of the ships are declared to be in “poor condition” and not on track to serve for the entirety of their service lives. In addition, the sea service will struggle to maintain a fleet of at least 31 amphibs into the 2030s as required by law.
Those are some of the grim findings of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the state of the Navy’s 32 amphibious assault ships (LHD/LHA), dock landing ships (LSD) and amphibious transport docks, (LPD), which come together to form Amphibious Ready Groups (ARG) that transport Marines, their aircraft and other vehicles across the seas.
Without these ships, which are based in San Diego, Little Creek, Virginia, and Sasebo, Japan, Marines can struggle to deploy or train, and Tuesday’s GAO report lays out how bad the fleet has gotten, and how hard it will be to get it back on a proper course.
The GAO highlights a host of longstanding problems that have afflicted the entire fleet to varying degrees, including chronic maintenance delays, competing budget priorities, ill-planned early-retirement efforts that went forward without required congressional approval, scarce spare parts, shoddy contractor oversight and other issues.
But the report does not address the Marine Corps’ original Force Design 2030 vision, which involved sweeping changes to the Corps to ready Marines for a fight in the Pacific. Under the original proposed doctrine, far less emphasis would be placed on large-scale beach landings centered around a few dozen amphibious ships and more would be put into Marines operating in smaller groups, and possibly from smaller amphibious vessels, distributed across a vast battle space. This put the future of traditional amphibs in doubt, but that vision has since been watered down due to competing interests, including the demands of Congress, and the amphibious assault vessels have remained a priority for the Navy and the USMC.
Two-high profile amphib failures this year showcased the real-world consequences of the fleet’s ongoing issues. The Boxer ARG, composed of USS Boxer (LHD-4), USS Somerset (LPD-25) and USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49), all experienced maintenance delays and were unable to deploy as planned in September 2023. Boxer couldn’t go until April 2024 and had to turn around and return to San Diego just days into its Pacific cruise due to a starboard rudder issue. After that, Boxer didn’t resume its deployment until July 2024, 10 months after it was supposed to head out.
ARG leaders later highlighted the training they were still able to do on deployment, but the GAO notes that, with Boxer unavailable, “the Marine Corps was unable to deploy the full 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and lacked the capabilities provided by F-35 fighter aircraft.”
The USS America (LHA-6) ARG was unable to patrol as a full group this year due to a lack of the three ships required for a full ARG, resulting in the Navy and Marine Corps missing exercises and creating a presence gap in the group’s assigned area of responsibility, the report states.
The Navy has also been down an additional amphib since a 2020 port fire, and bungled response, destroyed the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6).
Such readiness issues are not new in the fleet, according to the GAO, which cites Marine Corps records showing that the Navy had to extend 71 percent of its amphib depot maintenance periods from 2010 to 2021, and that this cost the Marines nearly 29 years in lost training and deployment time.
Marine Corps leaders have diplomatically expressed frustration with the Navy’s inability to get its amphib house in order, even as the two services continue to hammer out an amphibious fleet plan for the future that will help mitigate such shortcomings.
Then-Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith told reporters in July 2023 that four of the last five ARG deployments had failed to go on time.
“Did they have their full amount of training days? Did they have their full integration period? And did they deploy together as an ARG-MEU? If they couldn’t do that [then] we have a readiness problem,” Smith, who is now the Marine Corps commandant, told Breaking Defense’s Justin Katz.
Navy Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said at an event at the Stimson Center think tank Tuesday that the Navy was eventually able to deploy the Boxer, and that the deployment was extended so that the Marines could get through their training requirements.
She said the services are working to understand how they can work through maintenance challenges without impeding Marine training or certifications, and that the Navy has funded the purchase of new amphibs.
“We’re committed, locked shields, in everything we do,” she said, adding that such ships are “a capability we need all around the world, every single day.”
Two Navy reviews commenced this spring and in 2023, when Franchetti was vice chief of naval operations, seeking to get a full picture of “the wide range of problems affecting readiness in the amphibious fleet,” but the GAO notes that the sea service “has made little progress in addressing these challenges.”
Ship age and other factors means the Navy will have a hard time meeting its statutory requirement to have at least 31 amphibs going forward, the GAO report states. The service currently has 32 amphibs in its fleet and is mulling service-life extensions to keep the fleet at 31 vessels, but the GAO found that such work will cost up to $1 billion a ship, and that six ships will need such extensions in the next 30 years “amid rising ship construction costs and maintenance backlogs.”
The GAO also notes that the Navy maintaining at least 31 amphibs does not mean these ships are good to deploy or train: “In some cases, ships within the amphibious warfare fleet have not been available to support Marine Corps operations and training for years at a time.”
Several amphibs cited in the report highlight these ongoing issues.
USS Wasp (LHD 1), the oldest LHD class ship in the fleet at 35 years, is struggling to get parts for its conventional steam propulsion system. This is doubly concerning as the Navy mulls the possibility of extending the service lives of its LHDs beyond their 40 years to maintain fleet size.
“However, officials stated that replacing steam propulsion plants is not currently a part of this effort, so the Navy will need to continue maintaining them on LHD ships,” the report states, adding that the Navy is “taking some measures to address obsolescence issues with the machinery control systems” on LHDs LHAs starting this fiscal year.
New amphibs aren’t immune to travails, either. Less than three years into its service, the USS Fort Lauderdale (LPD 28) “is already facing limitations with its use in part because of poor equipment design,” according to the GAO. Ship and maintenance officials reported that the USS Fort Lauderdale faced challenges with the knuckle boom crane and the mechanical arm used to launch rigid hull inflatable boats (RHIB), which had high failure rates coupled with increased costs and ordering delays for parts.
What’s more, fuel and ballast tank level indicators were improperly calibrated and unreliable, and sailors didn’t have the information needed to calibrate the ship’s tank level indicators, resulting in the Navy having to fly in contractors every time a part needed recalibrating.
“The ship and maintenance officials stated that some LPD system selection choices involve proprietary parts that prevent the ship’s technicians from being able to maintain certain items, such as the fiber optic navigation lights,” the report states.
Aboard the USS Essex (LHD 2), shoddy contractor work and poor Navy oversight resulted in welds having to be redone because of a lack of quality assurance oversights, resulting in “extensive rework and delays to the repair period.”
Part of the amphibious fleet’s poor condition stems from a prior Navy decision to cancel maintenance for a sizable portion of the fleet. The Navy planned as recently as 2022 to divest 10 of its LSDs, nearly a third of the fleet, before the end of their respective service lives.
Congress came back in December 2022 and prohibited the Navy from spending money to divest a portion of those ships, so the Navy had to continue operating them, “even though it had already canceled the required maintenance periods,” according to the GAO.
“As a result, these LSD class ships fell into further disrepair, which compounded the amount of work the Navy needs to complete in future maintenance periods,” the report states. “In 2023, the Navy found that seven of 13 incidents that affected amphibious fleet readiness were linked to LSD diesel engine problems resulting from deferred maintenance.”
Canceling these maintenance plans created a backlog of maintenance work that the Navy cannot realistically complete, the report adds.
GAO also found that, in some cases, deferring maintenance resulted in the Navy having to retire amphibious ships earlier than planned. The USS Fort McHenry (LSD 43) was retired in 2021, six years before the end of its service life, and Navy maintenance officials described the vessel as “a poorly maintained ship that had accumulated a significant backlog (i.e., approximately $146 million) of deferred maintenance at the time of divestment.”
The Navy also struggles to meet its amphibious availability goals because maintenance does not happen on time, a problem that has plagued the Navy overall for years. Just three of 14 depot maintenance periods undertaken between Fiscal Years 2020 to 2022 were done on time, resulting in more than 1,200 days of cumulative delays.
“Maintenance delays can result in cascading delays to training and, ultimately, deployment,” GAO states. “Additionally, in total, the maintenance periods cost $400 million more than the original contract value for the efforts.”
GAO had identified such problems in late 2022 as it pertained to generating carrier strike groups. The watchdog recommended the Navy identify measures of success and performance in its ready-ship producing processes, but that recommendation remained unresolved as of September 2024.
Like the Marines’ Force Design 2030 vision, some outside analysts question if the Navy even needs such a sizable amphibious fleet, given the fact that those large ships are unlikely to be landing huge numbers of Marines under fire during a peer fight in the Pacific.
When it comes to the China threat, it’s highly unlikely that the kind of amphibious force provided by an ARG would be used to conduct an amphibious invasion, given Beijing’s targeting and weapons delivery systems, according to Bradley Martin, a retired surface warfare officer who spent two-thirds of his 30-year career at sea.
“That’s not gonna happen,” Martin, now a policy researcher at the RAND think tank, told TWZ.
Still, he noted that ARGs and MEUs can provide a variety of useful missions elsewhere in the world, including seizure of advanced bases, raids, reconnaissance, sea basing, supporting lower-intensity conflicts, and non-combatant evacuations, including in areas where China and Russia have major interest.
Amphibious assault ships upgraded to carry F-35 fighter jets could play a role in a China fight by serving as part of the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) construct, which would involve keeping China guessing as to where such aircraft are operating from. Go here to read TWZ’s past coverage of EABO.
The Navy and Marines would benefit from better defining and scoping the missions they want an ARG and its embarked MEU to take on, according to Martin.
“This will allow more focused attention on real-world needs,” he said. “This could lead to better definition of readiness and force structure requirements.”
Whether the Navy is planning how to use its ARGs in a China fight remains unclear. The GAO report gives a quick mention to “a modernization effort intended to increase the ship’s relevance in the future operating environment by expanding weapons, radar and other capabilities,” that could portend readying that fleet for such a contingency, but the Navy is in the early stages of planning for this effort and had not developed budget estimates for the effort.
GAO’s latest report lays bare the extent of the amphibious fleet’s problems. How the Navy, Marine Corps, the Pentagon and Congress will respond to these problems, and their myriad of causes, remains to be seen.
Contact the author: Geoff@twz.com