USS Bonhomme Richard Heads For Scrapyard After Devastating Fire

WASHINGTON: The Navy will scrap one of the world’s most advanced amphibious ships after it was ravaged by a a six-day fire that caused so much damage that repairing it was deemed unwise.

The loss of the USS Bonhomme Richard will ripple through the Navy for years, as it was just wrapping up a comprehensive $250 million overhaul that would have allowed it to become one of a handful of ships capable of operating the F-35B.

The July 12 fire tore through 11 of the Bonhomme Richard’s 14 decks, rendering 60 percent of the ship unusable. Repairing it would have cost as much as $3.2 billion and taken five to seven years, Navy officials said today. That repair bill isn’t far off from the price tag of a brand-new America-class ship, a more modern design, which comes in at around $4.1 billion per vessel. And it’s not clear that existing shipyards, already struggling under the weight of the Navy’s needs, could handle what would amount to practically a new build. 

In contrast, scrapping the ship will cost some $30 million.

The ship’s crew will be notified today of the decision; Congress was notified earlier today of the ship’s upcoming decommissioning, Rear Adm. Eric Ver Hage, commander of the Navy Regional Maintenance Center, told reporters by phone today. 

“Probably 60 percent of the ship would require replacement, including the flight deck and many of the levels below the flight deck,” Ver Hage, said. That would suck time and resources away from other parts of the Navy that desperately need the money to upgrade existing ships and build new ships in the coming years.

The 22 year-old Bonhomme Richard was one of eight Wasp-class amphibious assault ships, which join two new America-class assault ships in ferrying Marines around the globe, along with their helicopters and fighter aircraft. The USS America and Tripoli are F-35 capable, as will be the following ships in the class. 

The Navy considered multiple scenarios for the ship, including full repair and return to service, decommissioning the ship, and trying to find another role for a partially repaired ship.

“We did not come to this decision lightly,” Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite said in a statement. “Following an extensive material assessment in which various courses of action were considered and evaluated, we came to the conclusion that it is not fiscally responsible to restore her.”

“In the end, the decommissioning decision had a number of factors, one of which was, what would be the impact of the dollars spent, and the actual effort to rebuild,” Ver Hage said. “What would be the impact on the industrial base, and the dollars spent would disrupt our strategy for investment. And then from an industrial base perspective, we had concerns that it would impact new construction or other repair work.”

The loss of Bonhomme Richard directly affects the Navy’s plans to get more F-35s out to sea, as it would have been the fifth ship modified to operate the F-35, the next-generation aircraft slated to act as the backbone of the US military’s stealthy air fleet.

“I think this will make a big impact on the amphibious fleet, since it will now be down to nine operational ships,” said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Assuming the normal deployment cycle for amphibious ships of 7 month deployments every 32 months from US ports, and and 50% operational availability for Japan-based ships, Clark aded, “that means 2 LHA/LHDs on deployment at a time. With transit time factored in, there will be gaps in either the Pacific or Middle East and no room for delays in maintenance of the remaining LHA/LHDs.”

Currently, the San Diego-based USS Essex and Makin Island have been updated to deploy with F-35s, with the Makin Island recently deploying for the first time with the aircraft. The ships join the USS America (currently in port in Japan) and the USS Wasp (pulling into port in Norfolk, Va.) as the Navy’s ships capable of flying the fifth-generation fighter.