Over a Fifth of Navy Ships Aren’t Ready to Fight

[Soul Crusher]

Over a Fifth of Navy Ships Aren’t Ready to Fight 
 Spencer Ackerman July 13, 2011 | 10:51 am | Categories: Navy



More than a fifth of the Navy isn’t ready to sail or fight, at a time when demand on the fleet is off the charts. And the number of unready ships is likely to rise as Navy officers try to fix their chronic readiness woes.

According to statistics released by Rep. Randy Forbes, the Virginia Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee, 22 percent of Navy ships didn’t pass their inspections in 2011. In 2007, just 8 percent of ships were rated as carrying junk equipment or insufficient spare parts. And more than half the Navy’s deployed aircraft — the F/A-18 Hornets, the jamming EA-18G Growlers, the P-3C Orion surveillance plane — aren’t ready for combat.

The Navy’s surface fleet goes into the water banged up. Its aircraft carriers, frigates, destroyers spend nearly 40 percent of their deployment time with “at least one major equipment or systems failure,” according to a chart Forbes released at a hearing on Tuesday. That can include “anti-air defenses, radar, satellite communications, or engines.” Let’s not forget that even the new ships are disintegrating.

And the demand on the Navy is huge. Consider the last year at sea. U.S. Navy ships and aircraft performed support missions for Iraq and Afghanistan. They helped with disaster relief after Pakistani floods and a Japanese tsunami/earthquake. They fought Somali pirates and spearheaded an ongoing war in Libya.

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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/over-a-fifth-of... 



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[Soul Crusher]

Posted on July 13, 2011 7:11:37 PM EDT by Nachum

According to two top officials, the Navy is operating at an “unsustainable” pace for its current force structure. At a House Armed Services Committee hearing this week, Vice Admirals Bill Burke and Kevin McCoy described a force that was falling into disrepair and struggling to cover ever-increasing responsibilities with decreasing manpower and money.

The Navy’s maintenance issues began in the 1990s when Washington sought a post–Cold War peace dividend. One of the first casualties was manpower, and that led to smaller Navy maintenance crews.

At first, the Navy tried to get by, deferring maintenance and patching up old equipment. But the sustained high operational tempo of the past decade has finally caught up with the Navy. In 2011, nearly 22 percent of the fleet failed its yearly inspection, up from 8 percent as recently as 2007. Stretched thin by increased responsibilities such as wartime deployments, anti-piracy operations, and disaster relief, the Navy is trying to get by with broken equipment and often lacks the spare parts to make at-sea repairs.

Whether or not this decreased readiness is yet having an impact upon America’s national security is up for debate. While Admiral Burke stated that decreased ship readiness has not yet forced commanders to skip missions because of fewer available ships, he also admitted that combatant commanders generally require 16 to 18 operational attack submarines to meet regional objectives. Due to lagging maintenance and repairs, however, the Navy can provide only 10 submarines at any given time, exposing a serious gap between resources and requirements.

(Excerpt) Read more at blog.heritage.org ...






Hey - let's worry about bachmann!!!