FOUND AT SEA
The effort didn’t resolve some of the unit’s issues, however. In 2013, the USS Guardian, a minesweeper, accidentally ran into a sensitive coral reef in the Philippines. No one was injured, but the $212 million ship had to be decommissioned, and the U.S. ambassador was forced to apologize for the damage to the World Heritage site. Three years later, the Navy’s Sea Dragon helicopters, which stream cables that dislodge mines moored to the ocean floor, came under damning scrutiny. In a lengthy examination in The Virginian-Pilot, the Sea Dragons were found to have been used long after they were supposed to be retired. Over a three-year period, they had crashed at a higher rate than any other military aircraft, including a 2014 crash that killed three service members. The Navy’s plan to replace the minesweepers with a new class of vessels, known as Littoral Combat Ships, has been repeatedly delayed by cost overruns and technical deficiencies. The push to develop the new line of ships has been a financial drain on the minesweeping budget and the maintenance of the existing fleet. Congress, concerned about resources being diverted, has required the Navy not to decommission the ships or reduce how many sailors are assigned to them until
there’s a replacement that would “meet or exceed” their capabilities. The Navy, in the shipbuilding plan it submitted to Congress this year, said that in the next year it would begin retiring three of its 11 minesweepers – the ones based in the U.S., in San Diego – and harvest their parts to service the eight ships based in Japan and Bahrain. An officer briefed on the planning said top Navy officials were reluctant to pump more money into maintaining the older minesweepers and were taking a gamble that the new ships would finally be ready just as the legacy minesweepers were decommissioned. “We’d be extremely lucky if those lined up,” the officer said. “There has been a conscious decision by Navy leadership to assume risk in the present.” Asked whether the Navy was taking a risk assuming the new line of ships would be ready to take over before the Avengers were decommissioned, the Navy’s spokesman would only say that the Navy is constantly reviewing its capacity for the mission. In the Persian Gulf now, one officer described the difficulties of instilling a sense of urgency and mission in sailors who doubt the senior ranks of the Navy will ever trust their prowess if Iran were to deploy mines. “I have to tell them, ‘We always have to be ready,’” the officer said. “But it is tough to put your people through very hard conditions when you privately think you’re not going to go out.” © ProPublica
Robert Faturechi , Megan Rose and T. Christian Miller are reporters at ProPublica , a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
22
February 2020
Made with FlippingBook Ebook Creator