Navy to Christen Amphibious Assault Ship America

 

USS America |The Navy will christen the amphibious assault ship, America (LHA 6), on Oct. 20, during a 10 a.m. CDT ceremony in Pascagoula, Miss.

The Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. James F. Amos will deliver the ceremony’s principal address. Mrs. Lynne Pace, wife of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, will serve as the ship's sponsor.

From the American Revolution through the first Gulf War, three warships have sailed with the name America.

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Navy's Newest, LHA-6, A Dead End For Amphibious Ships?

The Navy will christen its newest amphibious warfare ship in Pascagoula, Miss. on Oct. 20th. The boldly-named, $3 billion America is a major departure from past designs -- and, quietly, the Navy has decided not to build many more like it in the future.

The Chief of Naval Operations himself, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, has said that getting more amphibs in the fleet is his "biggest shipbuilding concern." But the Navy is only building two vessels to the LHA-6 blueprint, America itself and LHA-7 Tripoli, for which shipbuilder Huntington-Ingalls recently received a fixed-price contract. Subsequent LHAs will revert to a more traditional design.

At issue is LHA-6's and -7's lack of what's called a "well deck." Most amphibs have a large compartment they can flood partway with water, with a door in the stern of the ship that can be lowered to let smaller vessels in and out. That makes for easy loading and unloading of the amphibious armored vehicles, hovercraft, and other landing craft that carry Marines and their heavy gear ashore. Otherwise such small craft have to tie up alongside the big ships while equipment is lowered by cranes and troops climb down rope ladders, a slow, laborious, and dangerous process, as the military learned in World War II. Since then, well decks have become a defining feature of the amphibious fleet -- but they take up a lot of room.

Meanwhile, aircraft have become ever more important to Marine Corps operations. Older ships were designed to carry conventional helicopters like the CH-46 and the Marine Corps's Harrier "jump jet," but their successors -- the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor and the F-35B version of the Joint Strike Fighter -- are much larger machines that take up much more space. So when the Navy looked at replacing its aging LHA-1 Tarawa class ships, it decided to sacrifice the well deck to better accommodate aircraft.

The result is what any other navy would simply call an aircraft carrier. At 844 feet long and 45,000 tons displacement, LHA-6 America is only slightly smaller than the Russian-made Varyag now in Chinese service and significantly larger than the French carrier Charles de Gaulle (neither of which has a well deck, either). Only the US Navy, with its 1,000-foot-long, 100,000-ton Nimitz class, would consider the America a small carrier.

Ships of LHA-6's size have proven useful in all sorts of operations, notably last year's intervention in Libya, when the amphibious ship USS Kearsage led US air operations in the absence of a Nimitz-class ship. Kearsage, designated LHD-3, is a traditional amphib design with a large well deck, which was idle in the air-only operations against Gaddhafi. In the same scenario, LHA-6 could provide more airpower in an equivalently sized package.

The problem is, of course, that not all or even most future operations will be like Libya in 2011. The whole point of having a Marine Corps is so they can go ashore. Modern Marine tactics de-emphasize storming the beach in landing craft a la Tarawa in World War II and instead focus on bypassing enemy defenses by flying forces deep inland. (That mission drove the V-22's unique design). But landing craft are still essential, less for the first wave ashore than to sustain the operation with bulk supplies and heavy equipment -- trucks, artillery, tanks -- that aircraft can carry only in small amounts or not at all. And if landing craft are essential, then so is the well deck.

So this February, after months of study, the Marine Corps Commandant and the Chief of Naval Operations signed an official memorandum of agreement that restores the well deck to LHA-8 and subsequent ships. A modification of the LHA-6 America design, LHA-8 will have a slightly smaller hanger than the America and a slightly smaller well deck than past amphibs like the Kearsage. (A redesign of the "island" structure will free up more room on LHA-8's flight deck to do maintenance on V-22s, compensating for some of the hanger space lost inside the ship).

Four years ago this September, before the keel was even laid for LHA-6, a former Marine named Bob Work -- now undersecretary of the Navy -- said there were big questions about the design. "Will it become the standard, or will it become only a niche capability?" Work said to National Defense magazine. The answer is now clearly, "niche." LHA-6 might count as a carrier in any other navy, but in the US fleet, it is a highly specialized and not entirely happy compromise between the massive airpower of the Nimitz class and the flexibility of the traditional Marine amphibious ship.

Navy set to resume sinking old warships in coastal waters after 2-year moratorium

FILE - In this March 2, 2005 file photo, the aircraft carrier USS America is shown in Philadelphia. In 2005, the USS America aircraft carrier was towed out to sea on her final voyage. Hundreds of miles off the Atlantic coast, U.S. Navy personnel then blasted the 40-year-old warship with missiles and bombs until it sank. The U.S. Navy is resuming its practice of using old warships for target practice, sinking them in U.S. coastal waters after a nearly two-year moratorium spurred by environmental and cost concerns.

The U.S. Navy is resuming its practice of using old warships for target practice and sinking them in U.S. coastal waters after a nearly two-year moratorium spurred by environmental and cost concerns.

Later this month, three inactive vessels — Kilauea, Niagara Falls and Concord — will be sent to a watery grave off Hawaii by torpedoes, bombs and other ordnance during the Rim of the Pacific naval exercises, or RIMPAC.

The military quietly lifted the moratorium on Sinkex, short for sinking exercise, last year after a review of the requirements, costs, benefits and environmental impacts of the program, the Navy said in a statement to The Associated Press.

It will be the first time since 2010 the Navy has used target practice to dispose of an old ship. Previous targets have ranged from small vessels to aircraft carriers such as the USS America, which was more than three football fields long.

Conservation groups argue that the ghost ships should instead be recycled at a ship-breaking facility. Concerns about the long-lasting effects of toxic pollutants onboard the ships spurred a lawsuit by those groups to force the Environmental Protection Agency to better catalog and regulate Sinkex. The case, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, is ongoing.

The groups said they did not plan to seek an injunction to stop the Navy from restarting the exercises.

“We are appealing to the Navy to continue their moratorium at least until our case is heard,” said Colby Self of the environmental group Basel Action Network, which joined the Sierra Club in suing the EPA. “After the vessels hit the sea-bottom, it will be a little too late to redress damages to our precious marine resources.”

The Navy says Sinkex offers valuable live-fire training for times of war and provides clean vessels for at-sea, live-fire exercises. The ships can be targeted from the air, ocean’s surface or underwater, with the results aiding the acquisition, planning and design of future vessel classes and systems, the Navy said.

For decades, the Navy destroyed the vessels with little or no oversight. Then in 1999, the EPA ordered the Navy to better document toxic waste left on the doomed ships while removing as much of the material as possible. In return, the EPA exempted the military from federal pollution laws that prohibit any such dumping in the ocean.

The Navy is still in charge of estimating the amount of pollutants onboard after the ships are prepared for sinking. In addition, the Navy must file an annual report with EPA estimating the amount of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, carried by the vessels.

High levels of the chemical are believed to increase the risk of certain cancers in humans. It was banned by the U.S. in 1979 in part because it is long-lasting and accumulates throughout the food chain.

Vice Admiral Gerald Beaman, commander of the combined task force running the exercises, said Monday that each ship will be stripped of PCBs and other contaminants such as asbestos, as required by the Navy’s agreement with EPA.

“There are severe restrictions that are placed on any hulk of that nature,” Beaman said during a news conference at Pearl Harbor, flanked by commanders from participating countries.

The Navy must also conduct the exercises at least 50 nautical miles from shore and in water at least 6,000 feet deep.

Beaman said decisions about sinking the ships versus recycling them are made outside the scope of the exercises.

A previous AP review of records from the past 12 years found the Navy got rid of most of its old ships over that time through target practice. Records show the Navy sunk 109 peeling, rusty U.S. warships off the coasts of California, Hawaii, Florida and other states during that period.

Navy documents show some of the ships it sunk contained an estimated 500 pounds of PCBs.

During the same time, 64 ships were recycled at one of six approved domestic ship-breaking facilities.

RIMPAC, which lasts for five weeks, features training exercises for thousands of military personnel from 22 nations.