A review by the Government Accountability Office has found widespread, systemic problems in the U.S. Navy ships that are based in foreign ports, which it says has resulted in “declining ship conditions and a worsening trend in overall readiness.”
The report was prepared ahead of Thursday’s House Armed Services Committee hearing looking into a series of four ship-handling accidents in the U.S. 7th fleet this year, including separate at-sea collisions of the guided-missile destroyers USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain that killed a combined 17 U.S. sailors.
In testimony prepared for delivery, John Pendleton, the GAO’s director of defense force structure and readiness issues, says the problem has worsened in the two years since the GAO first looked at the issue in May of 2015.
“The Navy wants to grow its fleet by as much as 30 percent but continues to face challenges with manning, training, and maintaining its existing fleet,” Pendleton says in a copy of his report obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Among the problems identified since 2015, which have not improved, is the lack of dedicated training periods built into the operational schedules of the cruisers and destroyers based in Japan.
“Based on updated data, GAO found that, as of June 2017, 37 percent of the warfare certifications for cruiser and destroyer crews based in Japan — including certifications for seamanship — had expired,” the report said. “This represents more than a fivefold increase in the percentage of expired warfare certifications for these ships since GAO’s May 2015 report.”
The report will no doubt raise serious questions for the other two witnesses at Thursday’s afternoon hearing: Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Bill Moran, and Rear Adm. Ronald Boxall, the Navy’s director of surface warfare.
Other GAO findings include the fact that the Navy was having difficulty completing maintenance on time, and that its crews were undertrained and overworked, at times working 100 hours a week.
“The GAO found that, in fiscal years 2011 through 2016, maintenance overruns on 107 of 169 surface ships, (63 percent of the fleet) resulted in 6,603 lost operational days,” or days in which ships were not available for training and operations.
The GAO says the Navy implemented only one of its 11 previous recommendations, and says the service needs to reassess the risks associated with overseas basing, the demands of sailor workload, and the size of ship crews.
The results of the GAO study were first reported by CNN.
Travis J. Tritten contributed to this report.
