Merely months after President Trump announced he would be expanding the Navy fleet to unprecedented levels, the United States General Accountability Office released a report Tuesday suggesting that may not be the best idea.
The GAO found that the Navy has been eschewing normal maintenance for over a decade and prolonging deployment lengths just to meet its operational goals. As a result, the Navy is experiencing "declining ship conditions across the fleet and a worsening trend in overall ship readiness," the report said.
The Navy began implementing a revised maintenance schedule in late 2014 that was supposed to emphasize increased employability — or the amount of time a ship is available for training and operations — but the GAO report found that even the new standard may not be up to par. Though there are not yet numbers to quantify the program's effectiveness, none of the first three aircraft carriers to utilize the schedule were maintained in a timely manner.
Prior to the new schedule, the report found that between 2011 and 2014 only a quarter of maintenance projects were completed on time. During that same time frame, the amount of casualty reports or incidents with faulty or out-of-date equipment doubled. In 2014 alone, the Navy lost nearly 1,500 operational days due to poor or delayed maintenance, the report said.
The GAO assessment came as part of a June report on the military's overall readiness, preparation and efficiency.
