Another USN ship disaster in the offing. Contrary to what one would first think, this is tangential to the “IED* recruiting crisis.” This is due to a separate recruiting crisis in Military Sealift Command (MSC) caused by the extreme workloads the civilian mariners who crew these ships are subjected to – far in excess of what military sailors or mariners working in the civilian sector are expected to do.
The US Navy is, of course, not looking to the future and treating the oversight and incompetence as simply more tens of millions of dollars they can write off.
All 12 currently-active Spearhead-class fast transports.
These ships are militarized fast catamaran ferries and largely intended for use rapidly moving troops and equipment around inside of a given theater. The class is apparently a perfectly workable port-to-port ferry but totally unsuitable for the various amphibious warfare schemes the USN and USMC have tried to use for the emerging near-peer and peer littoral and blue water fights. But then again, the era of contested amphibious landings in the near-peer and peer fights with the ubiquity of missiles and inexpensive artillery is over.
The upshot of this is that the US military is going to lose enough high-speed, shallow-draft sea-lift capacity to move a brigade at a time from Point A to Point B. This suggests that the US is 1) de-prioritizing actually defending the Baltic States and Finland; (2) equally de-prioritizing the defense of the Southwest Pacific on land; or (3) both, given that seaborne troop movements are now going to have to rely on far more conventional amphibious shipping that will be wasted on ferry duty, or highly vulnerable commercial shipping.
Military Sealift Command has drafted a plan to remove the crews from 17 Navy support ships due to a lack of qualified mariners to operate the vessels across the Navy, USNI News learned.
The MSC “force generation reset” identified two Lewis and Clark replenishment ships, one fleet oiler, a dozen Spearhead-class Expeditionary Fast Transports (EPF) and two forward-deployed Navy expeditionary sea bases that would enter an “extended maintenance” period and have their crews retasked to other ships in the fleet, three people familiar with the plan told USNI News Thursday.
Based on the crew requirements on the platforms, sideling all the ships could reduce the civilian mariner demand for MSC by as many as 700 billets.
This is mostly infuriating because these ships are brand-new. In fact, they actually commissioned a new one in February 2024.
In April 2013, the EPF program was added to the remit of the Littoral Combat Ship Council, so that the capabilities of both ship types could be considered together conjoining it with one of the premier naval shipbuilding disaster of the new century. In 2014, the USN considered outsourcing the management of the fleet, but concluded that the ships would continue to be manned by civil service mariners.
What’s interesting here is that there are actually six of these ships extant or under construction but only the two forward-deployed hulls have been mentioned as in line for mothballing. I’d be on the lookout for the rest of the class being similarly deactivated in the near future, even though some of them are literally still on the slipways.
With the exception of those cuts (which make up a small amount of the total), however, the obvious conclusion is that the US Navy is cutting auxiliary vessels that don’t directly support its high-end battle fleet. This sort of retrenchment and specialization onto the “core mission” of fighting World War Three, however, carries the risk that – as usual – the next war will be with the people we weren’t planning to fight. The USN has already struggled mightily doing what was, objectively, a very simple humanitarian aid/disaster relief mission in Gaza… and equally-mightily keeping the Bab al-Mandeb open to Western shipping.
https://news.usni.org/2024/08/22/navy-could-sideline-17-support-ships-due-to-manpower-issues
The first five ships in the class will require additional work done to improve the superstructure, at a cost of $350k-$1.2M each. The remaining ships which are still various stages of construction will require upgrading following construction as well.
https://www.wired.com/2016/01/yar-the-navy-is-fixing-its-busted-high-speed-transport-ships/
H/T to armchairwarlord at Twitter
* IED = Inclusion, Equity and Diversity
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
