The Burning of the USS Bonhomme Richard Could Mean Problems for the U.S. Navy

[Boats]

The Burning of the USS Bonhomme Richard Could Mean Problems for the U.S. Navy
By: Mark Perry - National Interest News - 07-26-20
Re: https://nationalinterest.org/feature...us-navy-165497

The irony is clear: even as the final embers of the USS Bonhomme Richard were being extinguished, it was the bent, melted and ungainly hulk of the Navy’s budget that was being rethought.

On July 13, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was issuing a press statement warning China that “the world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime empire,” the USS Bonhomme Richard—one of the U.S. Navy’s premier first responders to China’s growing naval presence—had been on fire for twenty-four hours. The amphibious warship, commissioned in 1998 and built for an estimated $750 million, had been burning since the previous day when a small blaze broke out in the lower armored vehicle storage area in the aft portion of the vessel. Within minutes that fire had spread into surrounding compartments. The “BHR,” as it is called, does not have the public profile of one of the Navy’s eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers but it is viewed as one of the service's premier warfighting vessels and named for John Paul Jones’s legendary three-master. The ship’s mission is to “embark, deploy and land” U.S. Marines in amphibious assault operations—supported by helicopters and, most recently, by F35B aircraft launched from its eight-hundred-foot deck. At the time of the fire, the USS Bonhomme Richard was undergoing maintenance, which was nearly completed, and was berthed at Pier 2 in San Diego.

he USS Bonhomme Richard’s sailors responded to the fire when they noticed smoke billowing through the lower deck. But the initial blaze could not be controlled, as there were only some 160 sailors on board and the ship’s internal fire system had been deactivated during the maintenance period. The fire grew in intensity into that Sunday afternoon, spewing clouds of asphalt, plastic, paint and other toxic material into the air over San Diego and prompting Navy officials to call on the San Diego Federal Fire Department for help. Shortly thereafter, an explosion ripped through the ship, knocking sailors to the ground, hurling debris across the pier and forcing firefighters into a temporary retreat. A call went out to nearby San Diego city fire stations for assistance—a “desperate measure,” according to a senior retired U.S. Navy officer with whom I spoke at the time. “Well, God bless the San Diego fire department,” he added, “but they don't have a clue how to fight a ship fire. They're just going to pour water onto the thing.”

By Monday morning, according to published reports, more than two hundred San Diego firefighters and fourteen local fire engines were on the scene—in addition to four hundred sailors from sixteen other ships—but fire officials feared the ship's superstructure would collapse, killing or trapping those fighting the fire inside the ship. Smoke billowed through the ship, where temperatures reached one thousand degrees, melting large portions of the vessel's structure. The fire was so intense that two nearby cruisers pulled off the pier, with firefighters calling on three squadrons of water-dropping helicopters and a fleet of fireboats for assistance. In all, fifteen hundred buckets of water were dropped on the ship by MH-60 Seahawk helicopters, mostly to cool the flight deck so that firefighters could board the ship. A squad of tugboats, meanwhile, poured water into the ship’s hanger bay. By Monday afternoon, the ship had taken on so much water that it had begun to list to port, and officials feared it would sink. The ship was eventually righted but then began to list to its starboard side, before being once again righted.

By Tuesday morning, with the fire still spreading, firefighters were involved in three battles: to control the flames, to keep the ship’s structure from collapsing and to “dewater” the ship’s interior to keep the vessel from sinking. The fire control efforts were nothing less than heroic: initial fears that the fire would reach the ship’s lower decks, where tanks held one million gallons of fuel, did not materialize. It took four days to control the fire so that by Thursday morning, inspectors could get into the inaccessible compartments to search for remaining hotspots. What they found was a gutted interior. No lives were lost in the fire, but fifty-nine people were treated for smoke inhalation and heat exhaustion and, as recent reports confirm, some of the firefighters (forced to share protective firefighting gear), have tested positive for the coronavirus. Navy officials speculated that the USS Bonhomme Richard would be a total loss and need to be replaced, to the tune of some $4 billion.

“This should have been completely preventable because the Navy is supposed to have good practices for stowage aboard ships,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told the Wall Street Journal. “If a fire breaks out, the Navy should be able to fight it immediately.” “Commander Salamander”—the U.S. Navy’s most widely read commenter on all things afloat, was even more enraged—airing his personal judgment on his widely read and often controversial online blog: “We got lucky: we got lucky the ship was not full of Sailors and so far there have been no deaths. We are lucky that there were no weapons on-board. We are lucky this was not a nuclear-powered ship. We are lucky . . . BHR was not sunk. [The Pacific Fleet] has had a bad run the last three years, this is just another black eye.” Commander Salamander also commented on the Navy’s public response, which he described as “slow and clunky.” Put simply, the loss of the USS Bonhomme Richard not only a blow to the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, it was a blow to the U.S. Navy’s prestige.

The fire shook “Big Navy,” the service’s Washington, DC-based senior commanders, who were already staggered by a series of public scandals, including the unexpected retirement of widely respected Admiral Bill Moran, the firing of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, the relief of USS Theodore Roosevelt Captain Brett Crozier and the resignation of Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly. Worse yet, according to senior civilian Pentagon officials, the Navy was still reeling from Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s under-the-radar announcement that he was taking future naval shipbuilding planning out of their hands and dividing it among three different groups—budget planners in his own office, force planners on the Pentagon's joint staff and Navy experts at the Hudson Institute. The Esper move was as unprecedented a vote of "no confidence" in the Navy as any in its history. Now, not only was the Navy’s thirty-year shipbuilding plan (its Integrated Naval Force Structure Assessment) being rethought “from the ground up,” a potential cornerstone of that project, a high-end amphibious vessel that included a suite of F-35Bs (and thereby recast as a “lightning carrier”), was a smoking hulk.

“This is not tinkering at the margins,” as the senior civilian Pentagon official with whom I spoke said in describing Esper’s decision to circumvent the Navy’s shipbuilding planning. “The entire Navy budget is being reshaped, and for good reason. Big Navy assumed that they’d have twelve aircraft carriers by 2050, but that’s thirty years away. Not only are these big-ticket items, it’s not at all clear that they’re the kind of ships we’re going to need in any confrontation with China. If we can be faster and just as lethal at less cost, then why wouldn’t we do that?" Another Pentagon official put the Esper decision in context: “The cost of one aircraft carrier,” as he noted, “is nearly equal to the entire SOCOM [Special Operations Command] budget. It’s bullshit. What a waste of money. Great power competition will play out in the unconventional and irregular realm. Deterrence is important, but we don’t need new fleets.”

The burning of the USS Bonhomme Richard is significant. It is not simply that the fire gave a black eye to the U.S. Pacific Fleet, it has solidified the new thinking about the Navy budget that has swept through the Pentagon’s upper reaches—and has recast the way that the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff and the Hudson Institute shape the Navy’s future. While Big Navy argues for the deterrence value of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, which can sustain themselves longer than an amphibious ship like the USS Bonhomme Richard, they are harder to maintain, take longer to deploy and do little good if their ship’s complement is infected with the coronavirus. Then too, as those rising voices in favor of a more mobile fleet point out, the U.S. Navy is undermanned and overbuilt: there are simply too many ships and too few sailors. Navy planners are facing a tyranny of numbers: a Nimitz class aircraft carrier is manned by six thousand sailors, while a Wasp-class amphibious carrier (like the USS Bonhomme Richard) needs twelve hundred. The most recent Nimitz class carrier, the Gerald Ford, cost $12.8 billion, while the USS Tripoli (commissioned even as the BHR was burning), cost one-third as much. In an era of flat budgets, the Navy is being forced to choose between funding operations, maintenance and personnel—or funding more ships. Which is why quietly, but inevitably, Navy planners are mulling a fleet of fewer Nimitz class carriers (perhaps no more than seven in all), while adding more BHR-like amphibious ships. The irony is clear: even as the final embers of the USS Bonhomme Richard were being extinguished, it was the bent, melted and ungainly hulk of the Navy’s budget that was being rethought.

About this writer: Mark Perry is the author of ten books on the U.S. military and American history, including The Most Dangerous Man in America, the Making of Douglas MacArthur. You can follow him at @markperrydc.

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Personal note: Well it looks like the scrap yard for this ship. Hull has been annealed and warped. Fire system malfunction with no redundancy working looks like the cause or part thereof. How the fire started has yet been established but the ship itself is a total mess and its superstructure is also destroyed. What can they recycle has yet to be determined.
We lost a capital ship in port how embarrassing. We are lucky it didn't blow up and I don't recall if it had weapons on board and how closed they came to being ignited. Sad day for the Navy and America!

Boats

[Boats]

What Happens If The U.S. Navy Can’t Fix The Fire-Damaged Assault Ship ‘Bonhomme Richard’?
By: David Axe - Forbes News - 07-27-20
Re: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidax.../#2dbbce9512fd

As we already know a fire broke out on the U.S. Navy assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard while the vessel was pier-side at the Navy’s base in San Diego on July 12.

The fire burned for five days, possibly damaging the 844-foot-long amphibious ship beyond the possibility of economic repair. The implications for the Navy, and for Washington’s long-delayed strategic “pivot” toward the Asia-Pacific region, could be serious and long-lasting.

The fire likely has achieved what no foreign power has accomplished since 1945—destroying an American capital ship. In doing so, the blaze could reduce the Navy’s front-line combat power at a time when the U.S. fleet is facing stiffening competition from the Chinese navy.

The fire aboard Bonhomme Richard apparently began in a cargo hold. The 22-year-old ship at the time was in the midst of a planned, $250-million upgrade that included enhancements for supporting F-35B Lightning II stealth jump jets. Before they can embark F-35Bs, older assault ships require reinforcement of their flight decks, among other improvements.

Temperatures inside Bonhomme Richard reached 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit during the five-day blaze, collapsing the superstructure and warping the deck and hull. “There is fire and water damage, to varying degrees, on 11 of 14 decks,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday wrote in a letter to the service’s senior leaders.

In the weeks following the blaze, the Navy quickly awarded National Steel and Shipbuilding Company in San Diego a $10-million modification to the company’s existing contract to upgrade Bonhomme Richard.

The extra millions are to pay for clean-up from the conflagration. “We're absolutely going to make sure it sails again," Rear Adm. Philip Sobeck, commander of Expeditionary Strike Group 3, said of Bonhomme Richard while the fire still burned.

But the NASSCO contract—and Sobeck’s pledge—don’t mean the Navy plans to repair Bonhomme Richard and return her to service. Several American warships in recent years have suffered major accidents. Not all returned to the fleet.

In 2017 the U.S. Pacific Fleet destroyers Fitzgerald and John S. McCain both were involved in collisions that killed 17 sailors, combined. The Navy spent billions repairing the destroyers.

Fitzgerald, her repairs finally complete, was moored near Bonhomme Richard during the fire and might have suffered some smoke damage before crews towed her away from the burning assault ship.

The service deemed Fitzgerald and McCain, respectively 26 and 25 years old, worth repairing. But it reached a different decision when the attack submarine USS Miami burned at a shipyard in Maine in 2012. The Navy estimated it would cost around $450 million to repair the then-12-year-old Miami, and decommissioned her, instead.

The damage to the Bonhomme Richard surely will cost more than $450 million to repair. Navy officials have just begun investigating the fire and likely won’t make a decision about the assault ship’s future until a detailed assessment is complete.

Even if the Navy repairs Bonhomme Richard, the ship will be out of service for years, reducing the fleet’s seaworthy assault ships from 10 to nine. Leaving aside Bonhomme Richard, the assault ships now include seven Wasp-class vessels and two America-class vessels. The most recent ship in the latter class, USS Tripoli, commissioned in mid-July.

The reduction has implications for the Navy’s amphibious ready groups and its new “light carrier” or “Lightning carrier” concept. An amphibious group usually sails with one Wasp or America. To prevent a gap in amphibious deployments, the Navy likely will have to accelerate or delay shipyard maintenance for an existing assault ship.

Besides costing potentially tens of millions of dollars, the changes to the yard schedule could increase wear and tear on existing ships, hastening their own decommissioning.

The Pentagon’s regional commanders also will have less naval air power at their disposal as a consequence of the Bonhomme Richard blaze. Not counting Bonhomme Richard, the Navy so far has modified five Wasps to carry F-35s. The two newer America-class vessels came out of the shipyard ready to support the jump jets.

The Navy increasingly has deployed the modified assault ships as light carriers by embarking a dozen or more F-35s in place of the usual rotorcraft. Many Pentagon leaders, notably including Defense Secretary Mark Esper, have argued for light carriers as a cost-effective alternative to nuclear-powered supercarriers.

The latest Ford-class supercarriers cost $13 billion apiece, more than three times what an America-class ship costs.

At the very least, Bonhomme Richard’s fire slows the momentum of the light-carrier concept. The implications are the most serious in the Asia-Pacific region. When it comes to F-35Bs and their compatible assault ships, the Navy has placed a priority on the Pacific Fleet.

Both of the assault ships that in recent years have embarked large numbers of F-35s for front-line deployments—Wasp and America—sailed from Japan or San Diego, although Wasp later shifted to the Atlantic Fleet. Tripoli will sail from San Diego.

Navy planners’ reasoning is clear. Assault ships embarking F-35s are a key capability for confronting a growing, and increasingly aggressive, Chinese fleet. "China has moved out to sea, and they have long-range weapons and a lot of them," U.S. Marine Corps commandant Gen. David Berger said in February. "Those two things have changed the game."

To thwart Chinese planning, Berger called for the U.S. fleet to spread its combat power across a greater number of vessels, which themselves should spread out across a greater expanse of sea. "I'm in favor of things like the Lightning-carrier concept because I believe we need to tactically and operationally be ... unpredictable," Berger said.

Losing Bonhomme Richard, even for just a few years, decreases the Navy’s options—and limits how unpredictable the fleet can be in deploying air power across the Pacific. “This is a big hit in the Navy’s deployment plan over the next 10 years,” Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain who is now an analyst with the Virginia-based Telemus Group, told Defense News. “Obviously we can’t just wave a magic wand and create another one.”

Eventually to replace Bonhomme Richard, the Navy could accelerate acquisition of new America-class vessels, but that too would take years and cost billions of dollars. Just one U.S. shipyard, Huntington-Ingalls in Pascagoula, Mississippi, builds the aviation-optimized America class.

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*** NOTE: But the White House actually has slowed assault-ship construction. In early 2020 the administration of Pres. Donald Trump diverted $650 million from construction of the third America, in order to pay for a few miles of the administration’s wall on the southern U.S. border.