The heads of the Navy and the Marine Corps settled on a standard to measure the readiness of the fleet of U.S. amphibious warships, according to a joint memorandum of understanding USNI News obtained this week.
The June 11 MOU, signed by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti and Marine Commandant Gen. Eric Smith, lays out a common understanding of what it means for an amphibious warship to be ready to take Marines underway on deployment.
“The Navy and Marine Corps lack a common lexicon to discuss [amphibious warship] readiness, both internal and external to the Department of the Navy,” reads the memo.
“The Navy and Marine Corps require clearly articulated readiness terms to understand the availability of amphibious ships for training and operations.”
The memo goes on to define ships that are “available” and “not available” based on a shared understanding of amphibious shipping.
The memo defines amphibious warships as: fully mission capable, mission capable, partially mission capable and non-mission capable.
According to the memo, fully mission-capable ships have crews that are trained and ships that are certified to deploy as part of an Amphibious Ready Group with Marine Expeditionary Units embarked. Mission-capable ships have not completed their deployment certification but have basic certifications and can support some Marine missions and training. Partial mission capable are ships that don’t have maintenance problems that would restrict Marine training or are ships that are ready to sail, but the crew is still in training. Non-mission capable ships either have restrictions preventing Marines from training, are in maintenance or underway on sea-trials or preparing to decommission.
“Ultimately, this creates a stronger Navy/Marine Corps team for all our Marines, Sailors, and the American people,” Smith said in a statement last week.
In a statement, Franchetti said the new agreement would help the services work better together in planning deployments.
“We stand ready to preserve the peace, respond in crisis, and win decisively in war, if called to do so. This MOU will ensure the ARG-MEU team remains the centerpiece of our naval expeditionary warfare presence, forcible entry and sea basing capabilities,” she said in a statement last week.
Prior to the MOU, the mismatch in how the Marines and the Navy understand mission ready ships has led to planning problems for MEU deployments that has combined with lingering maintenance challenges with the Navy’s existing fleet of amphibs, USNI News understands.
The lack of ready ships has delayed MEU floats in the last several years. In particular, the availability of the big deck amphibious warships that carry the bulk of the MEU’s aviation assets have played havoc with the deployment schedule of the service.
For examples, the Western Pacific float of 15th MEU out of Camp Pendleton, Calif., was set to join in a series of international training exercises like Cobra Gold in Thailand and the amphibious focused Balikatan in the Philippines.
The deployment was split due to maintenance delays of USS Boxer (LHD-4). San Antonio-class amphib USS Somerset (LPD-25) embarked on its own in January while Boxer and amphib USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49) remained in San Diego. Boxer eventually got underway in April but quickly returned to have a damaged rudder repaired.
Some Marine officials have placed the blame on the current MEU deployment delays on catching up on maintenance from surge deployments supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The obvious 800-pound gorilla in the room is the state of the amphibs,” Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, said last month.
“We have over 20 years of operations in the Middle East and [U.S. Central Command… We’ve ground our forces up pretty good, right. We flew the paint off our aircraft. We drove the paint off the bottom of the hulls of the ships. I mean, we just kept going without really due regard of what needed to be done and now we’re paying for it. And we’re trying to do it again … in a particularly difficult fiscal environment, which is never easy.”
