A scathing and detailed new watchdog report has found the condition of the Navy’s amphibious ship fleet — the fleet Marines rely on to be America’s rapid deployment force — is so degraded that it has already cost the Marine Corps decades of training and deployment time.
Half of the Navy’s 32-ship amphibious fleet is considered to be in “poor” condition by the Navy’s own standards, according to the Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday. “In some cases, ships in the amphibious fleet have not been available for years at a time,” which also means that “these ships are not on track to meet their expected service lives,” the agency said.
The figures come at a time when the sea service has become increasingly tight-lipped about the state of its fleet as a whole and insights into the state of amphibious ships come only when they publicly and visibly break down on camera. However, even then, officials have downplayed the issues actually facing their ships.
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The new GAO report served as validation for the Marine Corps, which has been raising alarms about the state of the amphibious ship fleet for years as it hampers the service’s approach to deploying units from the East Coast, West Coast and Japan.
“The Marine Corps is aware of the GAO report released … on the Amphibious Warfare Fleet, which fundamentally aligns with our perspective on the issue,” Lt. Col. Josh Benson, head spokesperson for the service, told Military.com in an email Wednesday.
“The current state of readiness impacts the Marine Corps’ capacity to support combatant commanders’ needs, to maintain a 3.0 presence with Marine Expeditionary Units performing heel-to-toe deployments, and ultimately limits our ability to respond to crisis around the globe,” he said.
Real-World Consequences
Over the last few years, the Marine Corps has been beleaguered by the dismal state of the amphibious ships, which transport its troops to and from points of global turmoil, in many cases acting as a deterrent measure. The state of amphibious warship disrepair has caused delays in deployments and, in some cases, created gaps in coverage that prevent deployed Marine Expeditionary Units, or MEUs, from coming home on time.
In a statement Thursday, the Navy said it’s committed to building and maintaining 31 amphibious warships as required by Congress.
“We look forward to working with Congress and our partners in industry to find innovative ways to meet that requirement, such as the block-buy of three LPDs [Landing Platform Dock ship] and one LHA [Amphibious Assault Ship] we announced in September,” a spokesperson for the secretary of the Navy wrote in an email. “We, alongside the Navy and Marine Corps team, are focused on ensuring we have the fleet and the force our nation needs.”
The GAO report said the impact of maintenance delays from 2010 to 2021 was 28.5 years of lost training and deployment time for those ships and their associated Marines.
The lack of ship availability has hampered responses to real-world events.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, officials said there was no MEU deployed. Marines were unable to evacuate American citizens out of Sudan during a civil war there in 2023, having to rely on other countries to pick up the slack, nor were they ready to respond to a devastating earthquake in Turkey in 2023.
Gen. David Berger, the top Marine general at the time, told Congress that in “places like Turkey or, the last couple of weeks, in Sudan — I feel like I let down the combatant commander.”
Then-Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, another top Marine general who has now retired, told Military.com in January that “luckily” there was a MEU deployed to Kuwait for training when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 last year, and it was able to cut pre-planned operations to respond.
“If we’re talking about months, months and months of gaps in between the crisis response force[s],” Heckl said of the amphibious ship problem, “we don’t have a crisis response force.”
Public Breakdowns
While Navy officials refuse to honestly and openly discuss the condition of their warships — often citing the need for operational security — the state of the amphibious fleet has gotten to the point where breakdowns are becoming more frequent and public.
Military.com reported on three incidents in 2024 that were caught on camera. The GAO report added more context and detail to those incidents, and revealed other ships plagued with issues that were previously unknown.
In April, the USS Boxer, after months of maintenance delays, began her planned deployment — only to return to port 10 days later with a broken rudder.
A pair of command investigations — made public only because of Freedom of Information Act requests — into engineering issues on the Boxer revealed that the Navy had been dealing with issues aboard the aging ship since early 2023.
Those problems were exacerbated by an engineering department that was poorly led and had problems that ranged from inexperience to allegations of assault among the crew.
Yet, despite those issues, Navy officials were publicly adamant that the ship was getting ready to deploy.
When the Boxer made it out to sea in August 2023, web cameras in San Diego Harbor caught smoke billowing from the ship as it moved across the water just outside the harbor.
Despite local observers recording radio traffic describing the event as an “engineering casualty,” a Navy spokesman insisted at the time that the incident was connected to system tests and argued that there was “no current impact to the mission, and Boxer remains focused on executing its sea trials.”
However, behind the scenes, apparently it wasn’t just the Boxer that struggled to make that deployment. The entire group of ships that was set to deploy with the Boxer — the USS Somerset and USS Harpers Ferry — experienced maintenance delays and each ship deployed late.
According to investigators, the Boxer’s issues meant that “the Marine Corps was unable to deploy the full 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and lacked the capabilities provided by F-35 fighter aircraft.” It also “affected the Navy’s and Marine Corps’ plans for the ship, such as missed international training exercises.”
In March, on the other side of the country in Virginia, the USS Wasp, the same class of ship as the Boxer, tried to leave port but had an issue that forced it to abruptly turn around.
A local ship watcher’s account reported that the ship suffered damage to its propeller shaft.
At the time, Navy officials said that the crew “discovered an engineering irregularity” that forced its return to port and conceded that “30-plus-year-old warships will experience materiel challenges.”
Then, in September, Military.com first reported that the USS Iwo Jima — the same class of ship as both the Wasp and the Boxer — also suffered “a non-propulsion-related materiel casualty in the engineering department” that forced the ship to return to Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia.
The GAO noted that the Wasp “is facing challenges with parts obsolescence and supply” and the whole class of ships “faces diminishing sources for the manufacture of parts for its steam systems.”
Ultimately, the report points to the aging steam-driven ships being a major problem for the Navy that appears to have no ready solution.
According to the report, “non-nuclear steam propulsion repair is facing a significant loss of repair expertise as an increasingly obsolete trade.” Navy officials told investigators that this “challenge poses immediate concern” because they are looking to extend the service lives of the Boxer, Wasp and Iwo Jima — as well as all the other ships in their class — “beyond their expected 40 years to maintain required fleet size.”
Despite the challenge of maintaining the steam systems, “officials stated that replacing steam propulsion plants is not currently a part of this effort,” according to the report.
Investigators also discovered that the Navy’s problems with its amphibious fleet weren’t just limited to older ships.
The USS Fort Lauderdale, a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship that was delivered to the fleet in March 2022, “is already facing limitations with its use in part because of poor equipment design,” according to the GAO report.
The ship is having issues with two cranes used for lifting cargo and boats and “has challenges with fuel and ballast tank level indicators being unreliable or improperly calibrated.”
According to the report, many of these issues are just not fixable by the crew by design.
The Fort Lauderdale’s tank level indicators are a new design, and the ship’s technicians do not have the information needed to calibrate them. As a result, “an industry qualified technician” needs to come out to the ship for recalibration. Other systems chosen for the ship have “proprietary parts that prevent the ship’s technicians from being able to maintain certain items, such as the fiber optic navigation lights.”
Role Reversal
The state of the amphibious ships wasn’t always the foil for the Marine Corps that it is today.
During the height of the Global War on Terror, when the Marine Corps was engaged in ground warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, the MEUs weren’t necessarily ready, Heckl said. But especially as the Marine Corps goes full-steam ahead on its Force Design concept, which prioritizes amphibious operations in the Pacific, the MEUs have become a centerpiece to its water-borne operations.
“The Navy had ships ready to go, and we weren’t there,” Heckl said of the mid- to late-2000s, adding that the Navy likely didn’t prioritize the amphibious ships because the Marine Corps wasn’t using them in that way then. “Now, the roles are reversed: We have the MEUs, trained and ready to go, but we don’t have the amphibious ships.”
Marine Corps documentation indicates that amphibious warfare ships have generally not met the Navy’s planned maintenance schedules dating back to 2010. Specifically, Marine Corps documentation states that, from 2010 to 2021, the Navy extended 71% of amphibious warfare ship depot maintenance beyond its original planned end date.
And now, more than a decade later, the upkeep for those ships has become costly and arduous as parts begin to age. In October 2023, the Navy and Marine Corps agreed to an interim solution, using other ships like the Expeditionary Fast Transports — that, while not as ideal as the amphibs — would help ease the pressure.
Last month, Military.com reported that the Navy decided to sideline potentially 12 of those fast transports, sparking more concern for the Marine Corps. Even the band-aid fix may now be off the table.
As a shortage of spare parts and old, unreliable systems dog ships like the Boxer and Wasp, the report also found that Congress has not made life easy for the Navy.
In 2022, facing shrinking budgets and growing costs, the Navy made plans to ditch all 10 of its Harpers Ferry-class dock landing ships or LSDs — at the time “almost a third of the amphibious fleet,” the report noted.
“In doing so, the Navy canceled all major maintenance periods for these ships, which included maintenance on systems such as the ships’ diesel engines,” and this choice “worsened the condition of those ships,” the report said.
However, in December of that year, Congress, reacting in part to public outcry from the Marine Corps, blocked the Navy’s plan to ditch the ships — a move that only made the problem worse.
“The Navy had to continue operating the ships — even though it had already canceled the required maintenance periods, [and] 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.
“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,” the report added.
Now, the Navy says that only one out of the 10 LSD ships is in “satisfactory” condition, according to its own standards.
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