Sending ships away from homeports ahead of hurricanes can cause disturbances to ship timelines, depending on the stage of maintenance, the commander of U.S. Fleet Forces said Thursday.
The amount of disturbance ranges, Adm. Daryl Caudle, told USNI News. Ships that are in a lull period between operational use and maintenance see very little impact. The opposite is true for a ship that just began a maintenance period and then needs to quickly sortie out of port, he said.
When it comes to hurricanes, making sure the base infrastructure is set is more of the concern, Caudle said.
Caudle joined Coast Guard Vice Adm. Nathan Moore, the commander of the Atlantic Area, and John Englander, president of Rising Seas Institute, at the U.S. Naval Institute to discuss infrastructure resilience and climate change.
There are two challenges with hurricanes, Caudle said. One is that the Navy tends to underestimate how many hurricanes there will be in a fiscal year and how much damage they cause to infrastructure. That means the Navy is pushing the constraints of its already tight budget to fix hurricane damage, Caudle said.
During hurricanes, the Navy typically sends ships in port out to sea. In the last month, destroyers sortied from Naval Station Mayport before Hurricanes Helene and Milton made landfall in Florida, USNI News reported at the time.
Another issue is schedule delays when they have to stop maintenance, shore up infrastructure or generally prepare for a hurricane, he said. They also get involved in hurricane response efforts.
“So that’s training that we’re not doing because we’re actually doing real world search and rescue,” Caudle said.
The Coast Guard also has similar problems, Moore said. When hurricanes come, the Coast Guard has to move its cutters and prepare other infrastructure, then be ready to do search and rescue efforts, he said.
“So all that is harder when we have more storms, stronger storms,” Moore said.
For the first time in his career, the Navy is putting more emphasis on resilient infrastructure, Caudle said, adding that Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti put it in her Project 33 plan.
“Degraded infrastructure negatively affects our ability to execute core missions,” reads the NAVPLAN. “By 2027, we will assess, prioritize and program resources to repair infrastructure directly supporting Navy Task Critical Assets to improve operational readiness in the Pacific. We will repair critical infrastructure to include piers, runways, utilities and other shore capabilities with an infrastructure condition of poor or less.”
Naval infrastructure is not in a good place, Caudle said, which is why Franchetti included it in her NAVPLAN.
“It’s not in a good place just due to historical methodologies by which we program, budget, fund and execute that to keep these facilities running,” he said.