ships are typically underway only 15% of the time. Sometimes, those interviewed said the training missions that get done prove as frustrating as being stuck in drydock. The sailor who’d been on the Devastator said the underwater drones are successful in finding mines only about 20% of the time. He knew of only one time when the crew was able to find a mine, and that was during a training exercise when it had the GPS coordinates for it. “We joke about it all the time,” said the officer who is based in Japan. “It seems like somebody’s doing a social experiment. They take 80 or 90 well-intentioned, talented or motivated people and put us on a ship with broken and unreliable equipment and give them an impossible task and see how they handle it mentally and emotionally.”
Sailors in the 5th Fleet’s minesweeping operations said they have watched the escalation of hostility in the Persian Gulf – the downing of drones by Iran and the U.S., masked gunmen rappelling from an Iranian helicopter to seize a British-flagged oil tanker – with a mix of excitement and pessimism. They are eager to contribute but doubt their ability to do so. Asked if the ships could effectively find and remove mines in the Gulf if they had to, one officer was blunt: “No.” The Bahrain-based minesweepers, more than two times the length of a basketball court, are made of wood so they can more safely approach magnetic naval mines. Sailors have to be cautious about bringing anything made of metal on board, mindful even of where they store canned foods. Like all ships deployed abroad, the minesweepers operate on a cycle: a planned ship maintenance phase, followed by basic training when the crew practices finding and disarming dummy mines, and finally underway periods, which include shows of force and joint exercises with allied navies. Those interviewed said the four ships do receive all of their allotted maintenance time, but the ships frequently require their crews to cannibalize working parts from other minesweepers – a challenge considering how few of them there are – or wait for new replacements. “It takes a long time,” one officer said. “Many, many months.” As a result, the officer said each of the four
That there are problems with the mine warfare unit is well known to the Navy. The Navy’s former top officer, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, told ProPublica that when he took command in 2011, he was immediately notified of the deteriorating mine warfare units in the Persian Gulf by the combatant commander in the Middle East at the time, General Jim Mattis.
Greenert said he responded by putting more of an emphasis on the use of newly developed unmanned vehicles that could be dispatched to find and detonate mines. And he ramped up mine-clearing exercises with other navies, including those of the British and Gulf states.
American Consequences
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