US Navy Surface Force set to have 75 ships ready daily

The US Navy’s surface force has a new objective that its top operational officer says will drive “every program and action” across the fleet’s enterprise: maintaining 75 mission-capable ships on any given day.

“This is driven by looking at … operational requirements, looking at exercise requirements, looking at fleet requirements. [It’s] about what we need to have in order to fulfil our requirements,” Vice Admiral Roy Kitchener told reporters last week ahead of the annual Surface Navy Association symposium, Breaking Defense reports.

Kitchener is the commander of naval surface forces, also referred to as the “SWO Boss” because he is effectively the most senior operational surface warfare officer in the Navy. He declined to explain further how his team calculated the number, citing classification issues, but did say that the new “north star” objective is the first of its type for the surface warfare community.

To get there, Kitchener is breaking ships down into three categories: non-mission capable, fully mission capable and mission capable. The first category, non-mission capable, represents vessels undergoing maintenance that would prevent it from being deployed in any useful operational capacity.

The ideal rating, fully mission capable, are vessels that have completed all their relevant training certifications, are not in maintenance and are deployed or ready to embark. In other words, a warship is fully ready to execute missions.

The final rating, mission capable, the category on which Kitchener’s new objective is based, defines a ship somewhere between the previous two labels. It’s a vessel capable of deploying and executing missions but may have a limitation or issue that is holding it back from a totally clean bill of health. For example, when the Navy discovered a class-wide problem in the Freedom-variant of the Littoral Combat Ship, service brass ordered those vessels to limit their speed to avoid triggering the underlying problem with the combining gear.

Kitchener declined to answer questions about the current state of readiness in the surface force relative to his new goal, saying the exact statuses of individual vessels are classified. But he aims to reach his 75-ship goal over the next two years.

“But just to be clear, we didn’t have a number before,” he said. “We didn’t have one in the surface community. And so, this is my attempt to say ‘No, this is what it is.’”

When asked to clarify which ships are included in the 75-ship metric, a spokesman for Kitchener told Breaking Defense the data set includes a total of 164 surface ships of varying classes, including vessels undergoing maintenance. The figure excludes carriers, submarines, Military Sealift Command vessels and ship classes that contain very low numbers of operational ships such as the Zumwalt-class destroyers and the expeditionary sea bases.

“It’s also important to point out that North Star 75 is not just about achieving a number, it’s about total force improvement in all measures of performance across all areas of readiness that contribute to mission capability,” said Cmdr. Arlo Abrahamson, Kitchener’s spokesman.