The Readiness Mortgage
The Navy financed 326 days at sea by borrowing against future dry dock capacity. The bill is now due, and the industrial base cannot make the payment.
The Readiness Mortgage
MD Marine Electric | The Current Conversation
Three hundred thirty nine days. That is how long the destroyer Spruance stayed underway before breaking a record for longest destroyer deployment that had stood since World War II.¹ The aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford beat its own record earlier this year, completing a 326 day deployment in May, eclipsing the 294 day mark set by the Abraham Lincoln in 2019 and 2020.¹ The destroyer McFaul came home to Norfolk on Oct. 23 after 332 days at sea, having spent eleven months integrated with three different carrier strike groups providing anti air warfare and surface fire support.¹
Those numbers read like achievements. The Navy's own leadership is telling Congress and the trade press they are closer to liabilities.
Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. James Kilby said as much at an Oct. 8 hearing of the National Commission on the Future of the Navy. Operations in the Middle East, he said, have produced <cite index="5-3">"artificially high combat surge ready rates" because ships remain at sea on extended deployments and have yet to return from the region
