A top Navy admiral told House lawmakers that sailors and ships based in the Pacific might be stretched too thin during his testimony Thursday on two deadly naval accidents this summer.
Adm. Bill Moran, vice chief of naval operations, said the service is still investigating exactly what went wrong with the USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald destroyers that led to very similar but separate collisions that killed 17 sailors, but the limited number of ships in the region and the high operations point to a service that is overstretched.
“All of these things culminated in this notion we aren’t big enough to do everything we are being tasked to do, and our culture is we are going to get it done,” Moran said. “We’ve asked those sailors to do an awful lot who are forward deployed, and perhaps we’ve asked them to do too much.”
Moran testified before House Armed Services members who are delving into the deeper readiness problems in the Navy that might have led to the deadly incidents among ships that are deployed to ports in Japan. The McCain and Fitzgerald collisions were preceded by a grounding and collision by two other ships deployed to Japan.
The Navy is in the midst of several investigations and reviews and has declined to provide details, but Moran said the incidents changed his view about those forces, which are based overseas to give the U.S. a military advantage.
“I personally made the assumption and have made the assumption for many, many years that our forward deployed naval forces in Japan were the most efficient, well-trained and most experienced forces we had because they are operating all the time,” he said. “I made the assumption, it was a wrong assumption in hindsight.”
However, the Government Accountability Office reported deep issues with the readiness of the Navy ships based in Japan in 2015 and reviewed new data for the House hearing, said John Pendleton, director of defense force structure and readiness issues at the GAO.
Pendleton found that 37 percent of warfare certifications for Navy destroyers and cruisers based in Japan were expired — a fivefold increase since 2015. Reductions of crew sizes are also causing overworked sailors, with some putting in 100-hour weeks, and that lagging maintenance reduced the Japan-based fleet’s training by more than 6,600 hours between 2011 and 2016.
Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee, said the majority of the ships are not ready to perform their primary duties in the Pacific and that the solution is to ramp up from the current 277-ship fleet to 355, as the Navy has planned.
“I think that we can all agree that our nation failed these 17 sailors and their families with these tragic collisions,” Wittman said.
