Forget the 355 Ship force the USN can't maintain what it has

If personnel readiness wasn't enough A recent GAO report has highlighted a glaring problem the USN has with its shipyards. Its really quite shocking. from 89 year old drydocks, to the inability to cover scheduled maintenance. Particularly troublesome is the inability to cover routine maintenence requirements for the exiting fleet. They need to get this in order before you expand or take ships out of the mothball fleet IMHO

There is nearly a $5B maintenance backlog alone and this estimate is likely far less than the actual cost. Uses old inadequate equipment on high-tech vessels. Drydocks are on average 89 years old and are in poor condition. Due to the lack of dry dock capacity, the Navy won't be able to perform a third of its scheduled aircraft carrier and submarine maintenance projects over the next two decades. Rising sea levels pose a threat to old dry docks. The Navy says it will take nearly two decades to address these issues, but GAO says it will take longer. By that time the fleet will have ballooned putting more pressure on these tired facilities. As of now the Navy is only funding roughly half the cost just to keep up maintenance on their own naval shipyards.www.thedrive.com...

GAO Report

a reply to: FredT

this is unfortunate, but true. and we're already seeing the effect of failure in maintenance plans.

the dry dock facilities are being run down by greed, poor leadership, and 'technicalities' in instructions.

if it's one thing Trump does accomplish, I hope it's a proper military reform. things are too compartmentalized to maintain any sort of order.

a reply to: FredT

Where does the military budget go? We pay hundreds of billions of dollars every year, and for what?

originally posted by: icanteven
a reply to: FredT

Where does the military budget go? We pay hundreds of billions of dollars every year, and for what?

Pensions, golf courses, Veterans, salaries, equipment. NASA's budget is $18 billion/year. US Military budget is presently $600 billion/year. The entire budget for NASA going back 60 years would be less than a couple of years budget for the US military in a single year.

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: icanteven

Pay, and base upkeep take up something like half our annual budget, followed by fuel, maintenance, procurement. The big issue with the Navy maintenance budget is carrier refueling and overhaul. That's $3-4B per carrier. Then come the subs being refueled.

When they were hit with sequester a few years ago they were forced to push off quite a bit of maintenance, which is why we wound up with all our carriers in at once for routine maintenance. Then all the money they had set aside went to the carriers, leaving the smaller ships in the lurch again.

That $600B also covers all the services. So while the overall budget is large, it's broken down into different amounts for each service that has to cover all their needs.