Lack of Free San Diego Dry Docks Complicates USS Boxer Repair

The two dry docks large enough to accommodate a big deck amphibious warship in San Diego, Calif., are currently occupied, complicating the repairs of USS Boxer (LHD-4), USNI News has learned.

Boxer came back into port last week with one of its rudders damaged after leaving earlier this month on deployment. As of Friday, the Navy was assessing how to repair the rudder to allow the 45,000-ton capital ship to return to sea, a service official told USNI News. The service would prefer to fix the rudder underwater with the understanding that the replacement repair could take up to two to three weeks, USNI News previously reported.

Complications could arise if the big deck needs to go into dry dock. The dry dock large enough to accommodate Boxer at BAE Systems’ San Diego repair yard is occupied by an availability for Littoral Combat Ship USS Oakland (LCS-24). The nearby General Dynamics NASSCO dry dock is occupied by guided-missile destroyer USS Chung Hoon (DDG-93), which is undergoing an availability to install the AN/SLQ-32(V)7 Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program Block 3. Moving either of the warships would extend both availabilities, USNI News understands.

The Navy is considering using a dry dock in Portland, Ore., at a shipyard owned by Vigor Industrial, but the service would have to remove ten feet of the Boxer’s mast so the big deck could travel under a bridge on the Willamette River to reach the yard, two sources familiar with Navy deliberations told USNI News.

Boxer returned to San Diego on April 11 after leaving on a delayed Amphibious Ready Group deployment with the embarked 15th Marine Expeditionary Group.

Boxer is the flagship of the three-ship Boxer ARG, which also includes USS Somerset (LPD-25) and USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49). The deployment is the first for the Marine’s new Amphibious Combat Vehicles.

The deployment of the Boxer ARG and the 15th MEU has been split due to the big deck’s maintenance woes. Somerset left San Diego in January on its own with elements of the 15th MEU aboard. Harpers Ferry departed San Diego on March 19.

Having Boxer sidelined has forced the Navy and Marine Corps to retool several planned engagements in the Western Pacific, including Cobra Gold off Thailand earlier this year and the bilateral Balikatan exercise with the Philippines. Boxer was supposed to be a key asset in the drills with Manila that are billed as the largest in 30 years. This year’s exercises follow increasingly aggressive moves from China against Armed Forces of the Philippines’ resupply mission to the AFP’s base on Second Thomas Shoal, USNI News previously reported.

Yes.

It is like intensive care units (ICU) in hospitals.

You always hear this breathless panic in the media (especially during COVID) "Hospital ICUs are near or exceeding capacity!"

The fact is most ICUs are designed to be run at 85-95% capacity, and in normal times, they do occasionally reach capacity. An ICU run at 75% capacity is a sign of a poorly run hospital.

ICU's are staffed with the highest paid, most qualified and highly specialized personnel and equipment. If you are not operating close to capacity, you are wasting staff and equipment.

It is my understanding that 90% ICU occupancy is the goal, because that leaves space for trauma cases and such to be admitted.

And so it is the same for drydocks, as you accurately point out.

It seems to me that you want to have drydocks filled as much as possible to take advantage of that scarce real estate, and keep track of the status so that a routine case occupying a drydock could, in emergent cases such as ship who has a holed hull might be able to be swapped out for temporary repairs for the ship with a compromised hull, though I admit this is conjecture on my part.

It may be wholly impractical to remove a ship from a drydock to do emergency repairs, though I feel sure I have seen that during wartime situations.

I lived in Yokosuka, Japan as a kid, and they had some huge drydocks on that base. One of them was where the IJN Shinano was built, which at the time, was the largest displacement carrier in the world in 1944. Ironically, when the war ended, the USS Archerfish (which sank the Shinano) was placed in that same drydock and many of the Japanese shipbuilders who were to work on her had built the Shinano.

There was much hostility in the air, but the skipper of the Archerfish opened his submarine for tours, and the hostility evaporated. I guess the Japanese shipworkers were far more interested in seeing the inside of a US submarine than smoldering over a ship that was sunk!

There was also an additional story about that particular huge drydock there that played out when I lived there as a military dependent back in the mid-late Sixties.

I had a kid I chummed around with whose father was a very talented plastic surgeon, some said one of the best in the world at the time. He was doing a lot of work on the young men coming back disfigured from Vietnam, and had a lot of practice because Yokosuka was one of the first places many of them came. I used to watch those olive colored helicopters with the red cross in the white square come marching along the sky to the heliport...one every fifteen minutes (or so it seemed)

As a kid, they seemed to me like huge tadpoles with rotors that chewed their way forward. I watched them for hours.

They would land, people would run out to them, unload blanket covered men on stretchers with iv poles and stuff, then load those men into ambulances and drive them away. The helicopters would refuel and take off again.

Anyway, this plastic surgeon had a huge German Shepherd named Siegfried. Just huge. To this day, it was still the largest one I have ever seen...and it wasn't just because I was a kid. My parents verify it. That, and they used to walk the dog on occasion by tying the leash to the side mirror on their station wagon and drive around the neighborhood.

Well, one day this surgeon is out walking this enormous dog, and all of a sudden for no reason, it broke out into a run. The guy had his hand twisted in the leash, and the dog dragged him unheedingly along the ground on his stomach, screaming and yelling.

He managed to get his hand out of the leash just as the dog reached this drydock and leaped into it. (This is a Google Earth image of the Dry Dock...the one with the ship in it)

The next day, on the front page of the Stars and Stripes, they had a picture of this huge, empty drydock with this little speck of a dog just standing in the middle of it. How it survived that fall, nobody knows.

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