The Navy will sideline 17 ships to contend with a shortage of civilian mariners, the Military Sealift commander said last week, prompting concerns from the Marine Corps about how it will support and transport its own forces.
Rear Adm. Philip Sobeck, the MSC commander, told reporters on Thursday that the move to dock more than a dozen ships was meant to give overworked and understaffed civilian mariners a break as the command looks to get “the foundation back intact” for ship maintenance.
While Sobeck said this plan would take place “over the next two years,” he wouldn’t say how long it will take to get ships back in the water. The result is that ships that support the Marine Corps will not be available, causing worries for the amphibious service that will compound existing challenges getting Marines to the field.
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Sobeck’s remarks served as the first official confirmation of an August USNI News report. A Marine Corps official familiar with the plan told Military.com on Tuesday that the service was aware of the Navy’s intent to dock the ships when the reset was presented in August “and had concerns with it then.”
“If this workforce initiative is a rebrand of the original MSC reset, then 16 of the 17 ships have direct Marine Corps equities,” the official said.
The official noted that prior discussion of the “reset” entailed potentially sidelining some combination of two fleet replenishment ships, a fleet oiler, 12 fast transports for Marines and equipment, two forward-deployed expeditionary sea bases, and an ammunition transport ship.
“Without these ships, Marine stand-in forces and Marine Expeditionary Units will lack sea-based transportation, basing, and support capabilities during a strategically vital period for training and readiness,” the official said.
That list broadly lines up with the ships that Sobeck said would have their manning cut, though the admiral said that “the reason why you’re not hearing specific names is because those names are based on us managing what ship at the right time to be able to maximize the maintenance availabilities and also the operational capability.”
The sidelining of the support ships comes as the Navy grapples with low readiness rates for its amphibious fleet, ships that Marines rely on to respond to crises around the world. In the last few years, the Marine Corps has been hard-pressed to quickly deploy following incidents of global turmoil, including in the aftermath of an earthquake in Turkey, evacuation of Americans from Sudan, and not having a “MEU out when Russia started forming on Ukraine’s border” in 2022 given the inability to deploy amphibious ships on time, now-retired Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl told Military.com earlier this year.
The Marine Corps has been grappling with the state of the Navy’s 31 amphibious warships — the bare minimum it says it needs to support its “MEU 3.0” concept, which requires “heel-to-toe” deployments from the East Coast, West Coast and Japan, according to the Marine Corps commandant’s August planning guidance.
The service had been planning to rely on fast transport ships to pick up the slack with the ongoing issues with the amphibious warships, according to USNI.
Now, the new sidelining of support ships that Marines depend on seems ready to compound ongoing concerns for the service as it continuously deploys to the Pacific, Mediterranean and elsewhere. The issue also comes as the Navy is trying to, more broadly, rebuild its industrial base amid constant delays and cost overruns in building new ships and issues repairing those already in the fleet.
The Navy’s top leaders say that too is a recruiting and people issue.
In April, the Navy’s top officer, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, told an audience of military officers and industry officials at the service’s annual Sea Air Space conference that “all of the industry partners are facing some of the same challenges in the workforce [that the military is].”
“So, we’re working alongside industry to generate some of these pipelines where people can be recruited, they can come in and get training, and they come out with a certification and then immediately go and be employed,” she went on.
In February, one local news outlet near Newport News, Virginia, home to several shipyards and the Navy’s massive base in nearby Norfolk, reported that their maritime industry is currently 10,000 workers short, and projections say that, by 2030, that figure could grow to 40,000.
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