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ALEXANDRIA – Good Evening, Drifters

Today was the best of all days: A day for Sealift.

Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, led by Friends of The Drift Bryan Clark and Timothy Walton, released a study today on the state of the domestic shipping industry and how that affects national security.

Anyone who has followed me for any length of time knows that this is a topic I’m somewhat fixated on. Something about all this talk of “great power competition,” contrasted with the fact that if we ever had to actually go to war with a great power we likely couldn’t do it, really grinds my gears. Seems like all the lethality we’re buying isn’t worth a damn if we can’t support it because of the sorry condition of our sealift fleet.

A goodly portion of my life is spent reading studies and papers, and I recognize that not everyone has the time for that so let me see if I can break this study down for you in a quickly digestible form so you can catch (are you ready for it?) the drift.

Let’s get to it.

DBL

Sealift Woes

Be forewarned, these are the highlights and not the full findings, so please find the full study here:

Strengthening the U.S. Defense Maritime Industrial Base: A Plan to Improve Maritime Industry’s Contribution to National Security

Here’s what the CSBA Study found.

The Problem: The maritime industry in the U.S. has declined significantly. The number of U.S.-flagged ships has dropped from more than 400 in 1990 to less than 200 today.

As you know from my previous reporting, the military has a requirement for 19.2 million square feet of roll-on/roll-off sealift capacity to effectively provide for the 90 percent of Army and Marine Corps equipment it would need to haul in case of a major conflict.

According to the study, even if everything we have worked, we’d still fall about 500,000 square feet short. And, newsflash, not everything works. The recent Turbo Activation last year – the largest stress test in the history of Transportation Command – only about 40 percent of the fleet was ready to activate on short notice and become fully mission capable.

The tanker gap is ever more severe.

Transportation Command has a requirement for 86 tankers, but DoD has only 9 tankers available with another 55 militarily useful tankers in the U.S. and 11 tankers with no military utility available. All told, that’s a shortfall of 76 tankers from what DoD anticipates the requirement would be in a major surge.

Compounding matters even further is a shipbuilding industry that is under enormous pressure from inconsistent orders for commercial ships and an overall decline in U.S. shipbuilding.

And finally, as we’ve covered before, the personnel to man the ships in the ready reserve force administered by the Maritime Administration is exceedingly stretched, with just enough mariners to man the ships in a major activation, assuming everyone who is eligible shows up when activated.

If you need to rotate those crews, there wouldn’t be any crews available to relieve them.

The Diagnosis: What we’re doing now – the Ready Reserve Force model – isn’t working. It will cost too much to recapitalize all those ships, though some will need to be purchased. Furthermore, any solution to shortfalls that affect national security must recognize and address the financial pressures faced by domestic repair facilities and shipyards, and find effective ways to boost the number of mariners in the U.S.

Recommendations: The study puts forth several ideas that could help get the country back on track and potentially help the maritime industry get out of the red.

Here’s what they came up with.

1) Strategy. First and foremost, the country needs to develop a National Maritime Strategy that encompasses the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, but also the sealift enterprise and Merchant Marine.

2) More U.S. Flags. The U.S. needs to make it easier and provide ample funding and support and encourage more ships to operate under U.S. Flag while focusing on increasing the number of ships available to the Maritime Security Program, which can be tapped by Transcom to be used in a crisis.

Increasing the MSP fleet, which are commercial ships that the government pays a stipend to in exchange for a guarantee they’ll be available upon request of the Secretary of Defense in time of need, could replace the surge sealift fleet at Military Sealift Command and the Ready Reserve Force under the aegis of the Maritime Administration.

Furthermore, the government should look at incorporating specialty ships such as cable ships and tankers, into a program like the MSP, increasing the number of ships in DoD’s orbit available in a crisis.

3) Fixing Infrastructure. The Government should invest in the shipbuilding and ship repair industry through grants and loan guarantees that could help shipbuilders to improve their facilities and better compete for work.

4) More Cargo. The U.S. should boost the industry by increasing the amount of cargo carried by U.S. flagged ships. The military has drawn down significantly in Afghanistan and Iraq, so even with the stipend for being part of the MSP ($5.3 million), ships aren’t getting enough high-paying government work to balance the books.

The DoD should start buying more oil from U.S. refineries that must be shipped by U.S.-flagged ships, increasing the market for tankers and giving the U.S. more access to tankers in a time of need, CSBA argues.

5) Take Care of People. The U.S. could increase retention for mariners by reducing the administrative burden of achieving both international and U.S. Coast Guard certifications, which are two different standards. “This approach would allow mariners to study for a single set of requirements rather than two, decreasing the cost and level of effort required to join the workforce,” the study reads.

The government should also allow military training to count toward a career on the merchant marine after transitioning from active service.

Finally, the military expects civilian mariners manning its sealift ships to go into harms way but would not provide veterans benefits to them. That’s not right, and the CSBA study recommends it get fixed.

The government should create a Merchant Marine Reserve and activated members would be eligible for benefits.

“Congress should establish a Merchant Marine Reserve similar to military reserve components. Members would receive basic training on naval operations and financial support to keep their licenses active,” the study reads. “If individual members are activated during a conflict, they would be eligible to receive veteran’s benefits.”

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And that’s it! I think we’ll skip The Hotwash tonight, this is getting long. It will return next week!

TTFN.