WASHINGTON – In deciding how to move forward with the warped and carbonized hulk of the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard, U.S. Navy leaders face a series of choices and all of them are bad.
The Navy has not yet produced an estimate to repair the damage to the ship, which burned for five days in July. Assessing the full extent of the five-day fire that gutted much of the upper decks and levels of the ship will take some time yet.
But no matter what the Navy decides, it will be painful.
The bottom line? The Navy can either: fix Bonhomme Richard at enormous cost; replace her with a new LHA, a class of ship that Congressional Research Service says is running about $3.4 billion per hull, further constricting an already squeezed shipbuilding budget; try to pull an old big-deck out of mothballs and overhaul it for a few years of service; or it can cut bait entirely and lose the capacity all together.
The service is facing a budget crunch, with the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine slated to have an outsized impact on the service’s budget for years. That means replacing the older Wasp-class amphibious assault ship (LHA) with a more capable and much more expensive America-class LHA would be challenging without a congressional largess.
Officials who spoke on background said that the Navy’s working assumption is that the repairs could cost as much as, or even exceed, $1.5 billion, though that number is subject to change based on a full assessment of the hull that has not been completed yet. If the repair cost $1.5 billion or thereabouts, it would roughly equal the original cost of construction. But that would still be significantly less than the cost of building a new big deck to replace the Bonhomme Richard.
In a phone call with Defense News, a Navy official who spoke on background said there were four ongoing investigations regarding the July Bonhomme Richard fire. Naval Sea Systems Command is conducting an investigation and a failure review board, geared toward safety and lessons learned. A command investigation delves into how the ship’s chain of command handled the situation both prior to and during the catastrophe. And finally, a Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation joined by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is also on scene.