A new government study shows the Navy doesn’t have enough sailors or ship parts to keep its fleets mission or combat ready. That's an obvious concern for national security and trade.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that too few sailors on ships, lack of training, parts and outdated systems are all contributing to the challenges the Navy currently faces.
Over the course of 20 months and ending this month, the GAO spoke to leadership, sailors, studied Navy personnel and maintenance requirements from more than 230 ships and submarines.
Diana Maurer led the team behind the report that points to a department-wide recruiting problem.
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“The Navy has a significant shortage, a significant gap, between the number of sailors that it feels that it needs aboard its ships and the number that it has," she said. "In broad terms, for every six sailors that they think that they need, they only have five."
The GAO said in 2023, that it was short 13,674 sailors needed to operate aircraft carriers, surface ships and submarines.
Sailors are mostly responsible for the daily maintenance when a ship is “underway” or moving at sea.
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“Second problem we found was that all too often sailors felt that they were not appropriately trained to do the maintenance and repair of board ship that they're required to do,” Maurer said.
Maurer said her team found a parts shortage problem on 25 of the ships they physically visited and surveyed. That number includes ships in the Navy's largest West Coast port in San Diego.
Also, she said many of the systems that track maintenance and sailor attendance used on board are outdated.
“They didn't have enough of the parts they needed in some cases, or they had parts that they didn't need that were taking up valuable space aboard ship,” Maurer said.
Maurer said the Navy's fleet is constantly moving and that demands vital daily maintenance.
“Like your car, right? So you drive it more, there's more need for maintenance,” Maurer said.
Maurer said the Navy may have relied too heavily on private ship maintenance contractors to cut costs.
“The Navy has been striving for all the right reasons to become more effective and more efficient, so that's great. One of the ways they opted to do that was attempt to reduce the number of crew members aboard ships. And there are a lot of different ways that they tried to do that or by relying more on private contractors to do more of the repair and the maintenance aboard ships,” Maurer said.
She also says the Navy responded and agreed to every one of its recommendations to bring its Navy fleets up to speed.
David Boone, CEO and president of the San Diego Military Advisory Council, told NBC 7 that the military in general continues to support nearly 25% of San Diego’s regional economic product. The San Diego ship-building industry continues to grow as well.
