The Navy’s amphibious ship schedules and Marine Corps units that deploy on them are out of sync, and without change, the services will continue to delay Marines deploying on missions, according to a federal watchdog agency. (Juan Maldonado/U.S. Marine Corps)

WASHINGTON — The Navy’s amphibious ship schedules and Marine Corps units that deploy on them are out of sync, and without change, the services will continue to deploy Marines late, according to a federal watchdog agency.

A driving factor is the Navy and Marine Corps are at odds about how many amphibious ships are needed to deploy Marines effectively, the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report released Tuesday. The report outlines recommendations for the services to work together to refine their availability goals for amphibious ships and establish when a joint plan will be implemented to address ship availability concerns. The watchdog also recommended the Navy stop canceling maintenance on ships scheduled to be decommissioned without the required permission from congressional defense committees.

The Navy has 32 operational amphibious ships — just one more than the Congress-mandated minimum of 31 ships. The Navy’s amphibious fleet, which includes amphibious assault ships, dock landing ships and amphibious transport docks, transports Marines and their equipment, including vehicles and aircraft, for assault and humanitarian missions.

But half the fleet is in poor condition, and some ships have been unavailable for years at a time, the GAO wrote.

“Historically, we have an example where the Navy had one amphibious ship that hadn’t deployed in over 12 years because it ran into major challenges in modernization. But that ship is counted toward its number of available ships,” said Shelby Oakley, director of contracting and national security acquisitions for the GAO.

On paper, a ship in maintenance was previously considered available. But ships in maintenance cannot always deploy and conduct missions or exercises, making it useless to the Marine Corps, Oakley said.

“Agreeing on that number of how many of these do we need actually [not to be] in major maintenance and ready to conduct operations and training. That’s one thing they are working through right now,” Oakley said of the services.

In June, the Navy and Marine Corps agreed on what constitutes an available ship, specifying a ship in a maintenance phase is unavailable.

But the GAO found the definition failed to address the types of maintenance that would deem a ship to be unavailable.

“The Navy considers a ship undergoing an intermediate maintenance period to be capable of stopping maintenance work and getting underway within four days (96 hours) to perform a mission. However, when we toured the USS Germantown in October 2023, officials told us that the ship could not deploy within 96 hours due to the extensive amount of maintenance in its ongoing intermediate maintenance period,” the report read.

The GAO audit spanned April 2023 to December 2024 during which representatives visited six amphibious warships at Naval Station Norfolk, Va., and Naval Base San Diego, Calif., to see maintenance issues affecting the ships.

The audit was conducted after years of amphibious ships deploying late. Marine Corps documentation shows that between 2011 and 2020 amphibious warfare ships were only available for operational tasking 46% of the time, according to the watchdog report.

In 2024, the USS Boxer and USS America amphibious ready groups and Marine Expeditionary Units experienced operational challenges that resulted in delayed deployments and missed exercises due to lack of available ships. Additionally, ship spotters observed the USS Wasp in March and the USS Iwo Jima in September limping back to port following training exercises off coast of Virginia. In both instances, Navy officials confirmed the ships had experienced mechanical problems.

Adding to the struggle, 16 degrading amphibious ships are on track to fall short of their expected 40-year lifespan.

To keep up with the 31-ship mandate, the Navy will need to keep nearly all its legacy amphibious assault ships in service past their expected service lives while it waits for new ships, the report said. Doing so will cost about $1 billion per ship.

A Navy deal to pay nearly $10 billion to build three new amphibious warships will help the service satisfy the congressional demand to have 31 operational amphibious ships, but it will be years before those ships join the fleet.

“Absent establishing time frames for completion of a Navy and Marine Corps agreement on the number of amphibious ships that should be available at a given time, with objective and measurable metrics to guide it, the services will be at continued risk of late or disaggregated Marine deployments,” according to the report.