The Maritime Administration, housed under the Transportation Department, is responsible for overseeing fleets of government-owned and industry-owned ships that could move military gear into theater if war broke out. These car-carriers and other cargo ships would take 90% of the ground force’s gear into theater by sea, though as the soldiers themselves would likely use U.S. Air Force strategic airlift.
Following a sealift failure in the first Gulf War, where 300-plus ships proved unreliable and took five months to deliver their loads to the Middle East, the U.S. recapitalized the fleet in the early 1990s. Now, though, those ships are aging out of service and the sealift fleet is small and unreliable — a 2019 turbo activation exercise showed only a 40% success rate when the ships were scrambled to sea.
Congress in recent years has tried to get the Maritime Administration to buy up to seven used vessels to add to the Ready Reserve Force, a government-owned element of MARAD’s sealift capability. MARAD and the U.S. Navy in March selected the first two ships to add to the fleet, but it’s unclear whether there are even five more ships on the market MARAD could buy to meet its needs.
Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., said at a recent American Society of Naval Engineers event sealift is of great importance, even if it doesn’t have a natural constituency to pay for it. While the Navy has the expertise to manage a ship program, the Army is the beneficiary of it, and much of the sealift fleet is run by the Maritime Administration. It’s easy to fall through the cracks, especially in tight budgets, he said, but it has to be dealt with.
“Think about if something happened today with an attack on Taiwan by China: the question is, do we have the logistical capability to respond? I would argue we’ve got a great first punch, but it would be very hard to sustain that, especially with the current age and number of ships we have in the Maritime Security Program, the Ready Reserve Fleet — all of those are far short of what we need,” he said.
“The Army can do all kinds of great things … but, you know what, you’re going to be sitting in [the continental U.S.] if something breaks out and you can’t get to the fight,” Wittman continued. “The Army needs to be pounding the table and saying, ‘Hey, listen, we need logistics ships.’”
The Navy’s shipbuilding budget is focused on a once-in-a-generation recapitalization of the nuke-carrying ballistic missile submarine fleet, among other China-focused priorities.
“But we have so neglected our logistics fleet that it will be our Achilles heel if we don’t get our derrieres into gear, and fast,” Wittman warned.
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