[FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Since 1946, the US government has maintained fleets of various "mothballed" ships that can be readied and used in case of a crisis.[/FONT] [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]These boats, some of which are very old, include military ships that served in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Desert Storm, as well as civilian merchant ships from previous decades. The fleets sit, mostly untouched and off-limits, in the coastal waters of California, Texas, and Mississippi as well as North Carolina and New Jersey.[/FONT] [FONT=Times New Roman, serif]Story and more pictures @ http://www.businessinsider.com/decaying-ships-off-coast-of-san-francisco-2016-5?op=0#[/FONT]
Great pic. By a glance, that is probably one of the Tarawa or Iwo Jima class LPH ships ("TROOP PERSONNEL HOLDING AREA FOR HELP TRANSPORT" is the giveaway here). I have never served on a Tarawa class ship, but I did spend some time on the USS Iwo Jima many years ago. And yea, I remember when that article would have been true. I remember seeing Suisun bay full of ships in the "Mothball Fleet", indeed dating back to WWII with Destroyers, Battleships, even Victory and Liberty ships. But by the early 1990's they were already working on getting rid of anything there prior to the Vietnam War, and today there are literally only a dozen ships left. And with only one exception they date from the 1960's to the 1980's. That one exception is the USCGC Iris, a WWII era bouy tender. I drove over the Benicia Bridge regularly in the early 1990's, and it was a familiar sight. Even the one ship off by itself to the west of the main fleet that was regularly powered up and supposedly ready to depart with 1 week notice which was not an official part of the fleet, but was still a part of it (the Hughes Glomar Explorer). But in the last 6 years the fleet has drastically shrunk, and it would not surprise me if it was gone in a couple more years. Something I find very troubling since that was long a major component of our plans for a future major war. We lack the capacity to move more than a couple of divisions at a time today, and we do not even have the shipyards available to build new ships if the need arose. So those ships would have been the ones to be activated to fill in the gaps left to missions and losses. And if anybody thinks I am kidding, consider the following. A photo from 2005 from a private company that gave cruises near the fleet to tourists. I count more then 50 ships there at the time (including the USS Iowa, row G). Now, there are only 2 rows left, and not a single one of them a "war ship". Every single ship in the fleet today carried the designation "SS" or "USNS", signifying essentially that it was a ship owned by the Navy, crewed primiarily by civilians to do logistical support for the fleet. If we ever ended up in a shooting war again in the future, we are in big trouble.
