When one big-deck amphibious ship goes into the yard for years, the problem is no longer about one hull. USS Iwo Jima, a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship often described as a “mini carrier,” is headed for a long maintenance and modernization period in Norfolk that is scheduled for completion by February 2028. On its own, that timeline fits the scale of depot-level shipyard work. In the context of the Navy’s amphibious fleet, it highlights a larger readiness problem surrounding the ships that carry Marine expeditionary forces, helicopters, tiltrotors, and in some configurations, substantial numbers of F-35Bs.
Iwo Jima is not an aircraft carrier in the formal sense, but its role overlaps with carrier-like tasks more than its designation suggests. The ship can launch and recover short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft, move Marines and equipment ashore, and serve as the aviation centerpiece of an Amphibious Ready Group. Reference reporting has noted that a Wasp-class ship can be configured to carry up to 20 F-35B short-takeoff and landing fighters in a Lightning Carrier arrangement, a concept the sea services have already demonstrated aboard USS Tripoli. That versatility is exactly why extended downtime matters.
The fleet these ships belong to has been under pressure for years. In a broad review of amphibious readiness, the Government Accountability Office found that 16 of the Navy’s 32 amphibious warfare ships are in unsatisfactory condition and that maintenance delays have repeatedly reduced ship availability for Marine training and deployments. The report did not treat this as a temporary backlog. It described an enterprise facing old hulls, deferred work, spare-parts shortages, unreliable systems, and recurring schedule overruns in depot maintenance. For amphibious assault ships like Iwo Jima, those issues are amplified by aging steam propulsion plants, a shrinking repair workforce, and the technical demands of keeping aviation and command systems current.
Iwo Jima’s own recent history reflects that pattern. Even before the scheduled overhaul, sailors and civilians from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center completed a two-week repair effort aboard the ship during deployment, including structural work and non-destructive testing. Such fixes help preserve safety and short-term readiness, but they do not replace a full industrial availability designed to reset a ship for the next phase of service.
The Navy’s challenge is not merely counting ships in inventory. GAO found that amphibious ships were available for operational tasking only 46 percent of the time from 2011 to 2020, below the Navy’s own planning assumptions, and warned that the service is likely to face difficulty sustaining the statutory requirement for at least 31 amphibious warships into the 2030s. That distinction matters because a fleet can meet a numerical requirement on paper while still failing to generate enough ready ships for deployments, exercises, and crisis response.
Acting Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jim Kilby captured the institutional concern in testimony cited by reference reporting: “I want to maximize the availability of our amphibious ships, and I’ve done poorly in that, particularly in [USS Wasp (LHD-1)] and Boxer deployments.” He added, I’m committed to getting our amphibious maintenance done on time so the Marines can embark and we can deploy as scheduled for the global force management process. For Iwo Jima, the yard period is a necessary reset. For the broader Wasp-class force, it is also a reminder that the Navy’s mini-carrier fleet remains valuable precisely because it is stretched thin.
_transits_the_Atlantic_Ocean.jpg){kind=link}