Why does one shipyard delay matter so much? Because the amphibious assault ship is no longer just a transport for Marines. In today’s naval planning, vessels like USS Iwo Jima sit at the intersection of sea basing, aviation, crisis response and the Marine Corps’ “mini carrier” concept, which makes every lost month of availability far more consequential than a routine maintenance slip.
The broader problem is already well documented. A GAO review of the amphibious fleet found that 16 of the Navy’s 32 amphibious warships were in poor material condition, a striking indicator for a force that underpins Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments and much of the Navy-Marine Corps’ forward presence model. That fleet includes the big-deck LHAs and LHDs that increasingly function as compact aviation platforms, able to carry F-35Bs while still supporting amphibious operations. That dual role is what makes ships like Iwo Jima so important.
The Marine Corps has spent years refining the Lightning Carrier concept, using big-deck amphibs as smaller, more flexible sea-based airpower nodes. Tests aboard USS Tripoli demonstrated 16 embarked F-35Bs in 2022, showing how an amphib can be reconfigured from a traditional assault ship into a light carrier-like platform. Vice Adm. Karl Thomas captured the appeal of that flexibility when he said, “One day you can have F-35Bs on the flight deck, the next day you could have MV-22s and you can be putting Marines ashore.” For planners focused on dispersed operations in the Pacific, that adaptability gives the Navy and Marine Corps another way to move combat power without relying solely on large nuclear carriers.
But the concept depends on ships being available, and availability has become the fleet’s defining weakness. From 2010 to 2021, the Navy extended 71 percent of amphib depot maintenance periods, costing Marines nearly 29 years of lost training and deployment time. The issue is not limited to aging hulls at the end of their lives. The fleet has also been dragged down by deferred maintenance, scarce parts, contractor performance issues and design choices that complicate shipboard repairs.
For the Wasp-class in particular, the challenge runs deeper than scheduling. Seven of the eight ships use non-nuclear steam propulsion, and the Navy’s own maintenance officials have warned that steam-system expertise and parts are increasingly scarce. That matters for Iwo Jima because every extended repair period is tied not just to workload at the yard, but to a shrinking industrial skill base that is harder to regenerate than a delayed parts order. When these ships remain in service longer to preserve fleet numbers, the engineering burden rises with them.
The operational effect is visible across the force. The Boxer and America Amphibious Ready Groups both saw deployments disrupted by ship unavailability, missed exercises and split schedules. Marine leaders have argued for clearer readiness standards and more realistic definitions of what counts as deployable, especially when a ship in maintenance may be officially listed as available but practically unable to sail. That disconnect is one reason the amphibious fleet can appear numerically adequate while still failing to deliver the full capability expected of it.
Congress still requires the Navy to maintain at least 31 amphibious ships, yet the same GAO work found the service may struggle to hold that line into the 2030s. Keeping older hulls in service could demand service-life extensions that cost about $1 billion per ship. For the “mini carrier” fleet, the significance of an Iwo Jima delay is therefore bigger than one maintenance episode: it highlights a force structure that asks aging amphibs to do more, even as the industrial, logistical and maintenance systems behind them struggle to keep pace.
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