Title: The Poor Condition of the Navy's Amphibious Fleet And Its Impacts
on Marines

Description: The Navy maintains a fleet of large amphibious warfare
ships that are primarily used for important Marine Corps missions. But
the Navy has struggled to keep these ships available for operations and
training. In some cases, ships have been unavailable for years at a
time. We find out more about this issue from GAO's Shelby Oakley.

Related work: GAO-25-106728, Amphibious Warfare Fleet: Navy Needs to
Complete Key Efforts to Better Ensure Ships are Available for Marines 

Released: December 2024

{Music}

[Shelby Oakley:] The Marines rely on these ships to be available to do
their operations. And when they're stuck in maintenance, they can't use
them.

[Holly Hobbs:] Hi, and welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for
fact-based, nonpartisan news and information from the U.S. Government
Accountability Office. I'm your host, Holly Hobbs. The Navy maintains a
fleet of large amphibious warfare ships that are primarily used for
important Marine Corps missions. But the Navy has struggled to keep
these ships available for operations and training. And in some cases,
ships have been unavailable for years at a time. What are the challenges
in maintaining these ships, and what's the impact of their poor
conditions? We'll find out more from GAO's Shelby Oakley, who led work
for a new report on this topic. Thanks for joining us.

[Shelby Oakley:] Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

[Holly Hobbs:] Maybe you can start us off with a description of what
these ships are and why they're important?

[Shelby Oakley:] So, we've heard these ships described as the Swiss Army
knife of the Navy. They kind of do a little bit of everything. These
amphibious warfare ships--or "amphibs" --primarily provide transport for
the Marines and their equipment like tanks and planes. But the Navy also
uses these ships for other things, like disaster relief efforts or to
retrieve NASA spacecraft that have splashed back down to Earth. They
currently have about 32 of these, but that number fluctuates as they
build new ones and retire other ships. Only a small portion of these
ships are actually available to conduct operations and training at any
given time. Usually about like one third, one third, one third--one
third are in maintenance, one third operations, one third in training. 

[Holly Hobbs:] And what do these things look like? 

[Shelby Oakley:] There's two different kinds of these ships. Amphibious
assault ships--these are the larger ones. They look a little bit like
aircraft carriers. They do things like deploy aircraft like the F-35 off
of them. The other kind are called transport dock ships. And they help
by providing the Marines with their landing gear for their shoreside
landing. What they do with these ships is they combine them. Three of
them make up what's called an amphibious ready group. The Navy and the
Marine Corps pair these two types of ships to carry about 2,000 Marines
at any given time in something known as an amphibious ready group.
That's what conducts training and operations.

[Holly Hobbs:] What's the goal for these ships? And do the Navy and the
Marines agree on that?

[Shelby Oakley:] That has been the source of consternation and
disagreement between the Marine Corps and the Navy over the period of
time--the number of these ships that are needed to conduct operations
and training for the Navy. Because of that long term disagreement,
Congress stepped in and said, 'You know what? You're going to have 31 of
these ships.' And so the Navy and the Marine Corps have been working
together to try and figure out, 'Okay, we have 31, but how many actually
need to be ready and available for operations and training at any given
time to meet the Marine Corps' needs.' So this is an important
distinction, right? Because, historically, we have an example where the
Navy had one amphibious ship that hadn't deployed in over 12 years
because it ran into major challenges in modernization. But that ship is
counted toward its number of available ships. And the Marine Corps is
like, 'That's useless to us if it hasn't deployed to be able to conduct
our missions.' And so really agreeing on that number of like how many of
these do we need actually be not in major maintenance and ready to
conduct operations and training. And that's one thing that they're
working through right now.

[Holly Hobbs:] So what is the status of these ships?

[Shelby Oakley:] Yeah, unfortunately a lot of the amphib fleet is in
pretty poor condition. This is especially true for some of the older
ships that account for about half of the fleet numbers. The condition of
the fleet has really led to challenges that the Navy has had in
deploying these amphibious ready groups--those three ships together at
any given time. For example, recently the Navy wanted to deploy a
three-ship amphibious ready group led by the Boxer, which is an
amphibious assault ship, for a 9-month tour. But because of issues
across all three ships that were supposed to be in that group, those
ships only spent 2 of the 9 months together in operations and training.
So it really didn't fulfill those needs. 

[Holly Hobbs:] Whether these ships are in use or not, that's got costs
money, right? Is the Navy just holding on to them?

[Shelby Oakley:] So the Navy is proposing to divest some of them. Now,
divestment is different than retirement. So retirement means I've
reached the years of service and now I can retire. Divestment means I
have not reached my years of expected service, but I'm going to stop
using this ship before that time. So you imagine this is kind of a
pretty important decision when you invest billions and billions of
dollars in these ships to say, 'No, we're not going to use it for, let's
say, the 30 years we expected to use it for.' The Navy wants to allocate
resources to different priorities, like building new amphibious ships.
But the Marine Corps is super concerned about these types of decisions,
because the Navy is going to be challenged to build new ships at a pace
necessary to keep the numbers that the Marine Corps thinks they need to
conduct their missions and operations if they divest of a lot of these
ships.

[Holly Hobbs:] So we've talked about the condition of these ships, but
we haven't talked about why so many are in disrepair. Do we know why?

[Shelby Oakley:] Yeah. So over the years, GAO has done a lot of work in
this area, and we've found that putting off maintenance or not
conducting maintenance that's necessary is a key factor in why these
ships are in such bad condition.  Specifically, in this report, we found
that the Navy, who is responsible for maintaining these ships,
frequently canceled maintenance for ships that it wanted to divest. So,
it made a plan and said, 'I'm going to divest of X ship. We're going to
stop doing maintenance on that ship because we're divesting of it.'
Turns out they don't always divest of these ships in the end, and that
deferred maintenance becomes a major problem for the Navy going forward.
A really good example is the Navy plan to retire the USS Fort McHenry
about 6 years before it reached its expected service life. So,
divestment. That ship was poorly maintained. And at that time, and that
decision had about $146 million of deferred maintenance on it. This has
been a broader problem that we've reported on. As I mentioned, the Navy
has really neglected maintenance across its entire fleet since the early
2000s. Obviously, we're involved in a lot of conflicts around the world.
And, you know, the up tempo was pretty significant and maintenance
really just wasn't a focus for the Navy. And they've taken a lot of
steps to improve in that regard. But we're going to be dealing with the
consequences of a lot of those decisions for many years to come.

[Holly Hobbs:] So given all of that, is the Navy meeting the needs for
the mission for these ships, and if not, what's the impact of that?

[Shelby Oakley:] It's going to be really difficult for the Navy to
maintain 31 amphibious ships in line with congressional direction and
the needs of the Marines. It's probably going to require a lot more
resources than the Navy currently has planned. And, as I mentioned
before, the Navy's not building new amphibs at a pace to be able to
replace these ships in line with what the Marines needs are. The Marines
rely on these ships to be available to do their operations, do their
humanitarian response are disaster responses. And when they're stuck in
maintenance, they can't use them. You know that USS Boxer I was talking
to you about was unavailable due to those maintenance issues, and the
Navy and the Marine Corps couldn't provide support for international
partner exercises that they were to be engaged in. They couldn't,
provide disaster relief in Turkey after the earthquake because of the
condition of these ships.  But I think really an important thing to
emphasize is, the Marines have to maintain certifications and training
over a number of different areas, and when these things aren't available
for them to do that, it can be a challenge to maintain certain
certifications, like launching an aircraft off of an amphib. And so it
really affects the Marines ability to provide a ready force.

[Holly Hobbs:] Is there a baseline requirement or a minimum for making
these ships available?

[Shelby Oakley:] That's something that is currently being discussed
right now. The Navy and the Marine Corps are trying to come to an
agreement on what that means, what "available" means. They have taken a
couple of first steps. They issued a memo, this summer that outlines
kind of high-level definitions for what they're talking about. But we
could drive a hole through some of the criteria that they were proposing
for, you know, what available actually, indeed means. And having that
common definition is going to be important to drive resourcing decisions
for the Navy about what it needs to do for these amphib ships. 

{MUSIC}

[Holly Hobbs:] So the Navy is responsible for maintaining 31 amphibious
ships that are critical to the Marine Corps mission--so critical that
Congress has directed the Navy to make the ships available. But still,
the Navy has struggle to do so. Shelby, given all of that, what more do
we think the Navy should be doing to better maintain these ships?

[Shelby Oakley:] Yeah. So we made two recommendations in our report. The
first is simply the Navy shouldn't cancel maintenance for ships that it
plans to divest before the end of their service lives. This has been a
residual impact. It's not just an issue with amphibs. It goes across the
fleet. You know, Navy officials told us that they don't plan to do this
again in the future. And that's great that they recognized that this was
a problem. But we haven't seen this written down anywhere in policy. And
why that's important is because, as everybody knows, when times get
tough and challenges arise and resource decisions surface, a lot of
times suboptimal decisions get made. And when you don't have a policy
outlining what your stance is on it, we're concerned that this could
happen again. In addition, I think we really want to see the Navy and
the Marine Corps do more to define some more of those measurable goals
and objectives for defining availability of the fleet, to be able to
ensure that the Marine Corps needs are met for training and operations
at the level at which they require.

[Holly Hobbs:] And last question what's the bottom line of this report?

[Shelby Oakley:] These amphibs are really the linchpin of the marine
cause needs for amphibious training and operations. But unfortunately,
lack of prioritization by the Navy has resulted in poor material
condition of these ships and these delays in their maintenance continue
to affect how they can be available for the Navy to do the things that
they need to do to conduct training and operations. The Navy really
needs to tackle the root causes of what got us to this point and address
them to ensure that we aren't just continuing to admire this as an
issue, but that the Navy's actually going to take real action to address
these root causes and make sure they don't continue into the future.

[Holly Hobbs:] That was GAO's Shelby Oakley talking about our new report
on the Navy's amphibious ships. Thanks for your time, Shelby.

[Shelby Oakley:] Thanks for having me.

[Holly Hobbs:] And thank you for listening to the Watchdog Report. To
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