Why Half the Navy's Assault Ships Can't Go to War

There is a warship tied to a pier in Virginia that has not been to sea in more than 10 years. The USS Tortuga is 609 feet long and displaces close to 16,000 tons. She is not retired and she is not a museum. On paper she is a counted unit of the American battle force. One of the 32 amphibious warfare ships the Navy points to when it promises Congress it can land Marines on a hostile shore anywhere on earth. In reality, she cannot answer the call and according to the government accountability office, Tortuga is only the most extreme case of a much larger problem. As of the government's audit, 16 of those 32 ships, exactly half of the Navy's amphibious fleet, were rated in poor material condition. Not by critics, not by journalists, by the Navy's own inspection standards. Half of the fleet built to carry Marines into war cannot be trusted to do the one job it exists for. That did not happen because of an enemy. It happened in large part because of a bet the Navy made on purpose. A cost-saving gamble that collided with an act of Congress and left the fleet stranded between the ships it stopped maintaining and the ships it cannot finish building. The commandant of the Marine Corps has settled on one word for the result, crisis. To understand how half a fleet goes dark, start with what these ships actually are. The amphibious force comes in three types. The big deck assault ships, the Wasp and America classes, are 40,000 ton flat tops that launch helicopters, Ospreys and F-35B fighters, small aircraft carriers in everything but name. Below them sit the San Antonio class transport docks and below those the Whidbey Island and Harper's Ferry class dock landing ships, the oldest hulls in the force, built around flooded well decks that send hovercraft full of Marines toward the beach. Three of these ships together form an amphibious ready group and embarked aboard it rides a marine expeditionary unit, roughly 2,200 Marines with their aircraft, their vehicles, their artillery and weeks of supplies. This is the tool America reaches for when an embassy burns or a coastline collapses, a battalion that needs no runway, no permission and no port. Congress considers that tool important enough to protect by statute. In the fiscal 2023 defense bill, lawmakers wrote a floor into law the Navy may not fall below 31 amphibious warfare ships. Today it operates 32, one hull above the legal minimum and that is before anyone asks whether those hulls actually run. In December 2024, the Government Accountability Office asked exactly that. Its audit, ordered by Congress, found that as of March 2024, 16 of the 32 ships were in poor material condition. The definition is precise. A poor rating means a ship is no longer on track to reach the end of its planned service life. Too much mandatory maintenance deferred, essential systems degraded, structural repairs piling up faster than shipyards can clear them. Nearly every dock landing ship in the fleet carried the rating. So did the majority of the WASP class big decks. Some ships had been unavailable, not for months, but for years at a time. And across the decade from 2011 to 2020, the amphibious fleet was available for operations just 46 percent of the time. Then comes the number that turns a maintenance story into a warfighting problem. The Marine Corps has been explicit. A 31-ship fleet only works if 80 percent of it is ready to sail when the order comes. The actual readiness rate, as reported by defense officials, 41 percent. Do the math and it comes out to roughly 13 usable ships on a given day to cover the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Caribbean simultaneously. So how does the best funded Navy on Earth end up with half its assault fleet dying at the pier? The answer is not simple neglect. It is a decision and it has a paper trail. Since 2010, the Navy has not managed to keep its amphibious ships on their maintenance schedules. Aircraft carriers and submarines stand first in line at the shipyards. The gator fleet waits. Between 2010 and 2021, more than two-thirds of amphibious maintenance periods ran past their planned end dates. Every overrun cascades into the next ship's slot and every deferral makes the eventual repair bill larger. The machinery makes it worse. Seven of the eight Wasp-class ships still run on steam propulsion. Boilers and turbines from an industrial-era American industry has largely left behind. The engineers who understand these plants are aging out, the vendors who made the parts are gone, and crews resort to pulling components off sister ships to keep their own alive. But the decisive blow was self-inflicted. In recent budget cycles, the Navy concluded that its oldest amphibious ships were no longer worth their upkeep. It proposed retiring them early to free up money for new construction, and anticipating approval, it began canceling their scheduled maintenance. The GAO found the service canceled critical maintenance on ships it planned to divest before even completing the required waiver process. Then Congress said no. Lawmakers rejected the retirements and locked the 31-ship floor into law. The ships would stay, but the overhauls they had skipped could not be unskipped. Steel corrodes on its own schedule. It does not accept apologies. The GAO's conclusion was blunt. The Navy is still relying on ships it chose not to maintain, while it waits for replacements that The consequences are no longer theoretical. The USS Boxer, a Wasp-class big deck, spent nearly five years out of service for repairs. When her amphibious ready group finally deployed in 2024, it left months late and in pieces, the three ships sailing separately because they could not all get ready at once. The USS America's group deployed with two ships instead of three, because a third simply was not available. And in April 2023, when fighting erupted in Sudan and American citizens needed to get out, there was no amphibious ready group within reach, and the evacuation ran on chartered aircraft instead. The capability these ships exist to guarantee was not there when the moment came. What is deterrence worth when the deterrent cannot leave the pier? Last year, the gap widened into something the Marine Corps had spent decades avoiding, more than five months in which no Marine Expeditionary Unit was deployed at sea anywhere in the world, even as amphibious ships were pulled toward the Caribbean for counter-cartel operations. The Commandant, General Eric Smith, summarized the position with unusual candor. He has the Marines, the squadrons, the battalions. I just don't have the amphibs. If you measure naval power the way this channel does, not by what a fleet owns, but by what it can actually put to sea, subscribe, because that difference is exactly where stories like this one live. Which raises the obvious question, why not simply build new ships faster? The Navy is trying, and that is where the crisis compounds. Even as it deferred maintenance, the service committed nearly 10 billion dollars to replacement amphibious ships. The money is real. The schedule is the problem. The next big deck assault ship, the future USS Bougainville, had her keel laid in 1919. Her delivery date has slipped year after year and now stands at July 2027, and the Navy's own budget documents concede the next two big decks will each take about nine years to build. Her sister, the future USS Fallujah, is now projected for 2031. The Navy cites shipyard labor shortages. The shipbuilder cites first-of-class complexity and testing. Whatever the cause, the arithmetic is unforgiving. The fleet loses ready ships by the month and gains new ones by the half decade. That leaves the ships already in the water. To keep the fleet above its legal floor, the Navy is planning service life extensions, programs to push decades-old hulls toward their fourth and fifth decades of service. The GAO estimates that extending the lives of these ships could cost around a billion dollars, with some vessels expected to keep serving for 30 more years, which means steam plants designed in the 1960s and 70s aboard ships the Navy tried to throw away are now scheduled to sail toward the 2050s. And while the fleet shrinks in practice, the requirement is growing on paper. The Marine Corps' ongoing analysis points toward a need for roughly 40 amphibious ships to keep three Marine Expeditionary Units deployed at once. Hold those two numbers next to each other. The target is moving toward 40. The number of ships ready today is about 13. Have you ever watched an institution promise to triple its output while its factory floor was falling apart? That is the position the amphibious force is in right now. None of this means the ships themselves are bad designs. A WASP-class big deck with a Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard remains one of the most flexible instruments any nation has ever put to sea, hospital, airport, harbor, and strike platform in a single hull. The failure is not the concept. It is the choice, repeated across 15 years of budgets, to treat maintenance as the savings account that always gets rated first. Carriers make headlines, submarines get priority, destroyers get numbers, and the gray ships that carry Marines got deferred, extended, canceled, and finally audited. So the title of this video deserves its answer in one sentence. Half the Navy's assault ships cannot go to war because the Navy gambled that it would be allowed to retire them, stopped maintaining them in advance, lost the gamble, and must now sail the consequences for decades because the replacements take nine years from first steal to delivery. Back in Virginia, the Tortuga is still tied to her peer. A ship the law counts and the fleet cannot use. Every year she sits there, 2,200 Marines somewhere in the world train for a deployment that may not have a ship. The Pentagon faces a choice it can no longer defer. Pour billions into resurrecting worn-out steamships to hold the line or let them go and everything on shipyards that are already years behind. So pick a side. Type fix if you would rebuild the ships the Navy already owns and type build if you would retire them and put every dollar into new construction because Congress is about to make that exact decision with your Marines aboard the answer.