

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.

At Forbes' hearing, two senior Navy officers, Vice Adm. William Burke and Vice Adm. Kevin McCoy, signaled that the readiness problem's going to get worse before it gets better. As engineers perform more detailed inspections – the admirals' solution to the problem – they'll probably expose even deeper maintenance woes. And ship maintenance "came up short" in the current defense budget, Burke said, with $5 billion devoted to patching up the fleet.

Philip Ewing of DoD Buzz contends that today's Navy is paying the bill for short-sighted Pentagon decisions in the late '90s and early 2000s. As someone who documented "systemic, service-wide problems with preventive maintenance" at emerged at the end of the last decade, Ewing writes that the Navy cut back on maintenance crews, used computer programs instead of skilled chiefs for maintenance instruction, and "simple budget cuts meant ships didn’t get the regular maintenance or spare parts they needed."

Now consider that the Navy's facing down three big trends. The Obama administration's $400 billion, 12-year defense budget cut means it has to juggle priorities if it wants to get its ships and planes ready to fight. (Bye-bye, super lasers.) The Pentagon sees the U.S.' most likely security showdowns occurring at sea and in the air, especially in the western Pacific – the Navy's wheelhouse. Finally, unless the Navy goes on a shipbuilding surge in the next decade, the fleet might shrink by about 70 ships as the Reagan-era subs and combatants meet the end of their service life in the 2020s.

The Navy, in other words, is staring down an era of doing more with less. And the decks it's looking out from appear increasingly creaky and junked.

Photo: U.S. Navy

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