Sometimes government agencies are like athletes on steroids. They pump up their figures to create an illusion of strength.
Federal Maritime Administration officials would like you to think that their agency is the bureaucratic equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The agency, which keeps a fleet of reserve ships for the Navy to use in the event of war, has hundreds of those ships ready to sail.In reality, a large number of the backup ships are rustbuckets that have no place in the inventory of combat-ready vessels. The Maritime Administration, an agency within the Transportation Department, oversees a fleet of 317 reserve ships docked at various ports throughout the country. For years, the Defense Department and congressional investigators have privately criticized the program. They say that if the United States was pulled into a full-scale war, many of the reserve boats would need major repairs to sail.
Congressional investigators told our associate Scott Sleek that at least 120 of the ships have outlived their usefulness and should be scrapped.
This leads to another problem. When the Maritime Administration has the sense to scrap a ship, it can't do that right either. Instead of selling the ships to American scrap merchants, the government sinks them or sells them to foreign companies, particularly in Japan and Taiwan.
American scrap companies complain they can't get enough government business, but the Maritime Administration says no American companies bid on the scrap contracts. The American companies counter that claim, saying that they know the bidding is futile because foreign companies get the contracts because they pay more.
The reserve program is now the target of a congressional probe led by Rep. William Broomfield, R-Mich. He has scheduled a hearing on the problem for June 4. Broomfield thinks the fleet management is troublesome in a time when the Pentagon is trying to cut back on perfectly good weaponry because of the optimistic outlook for world peace.
We first reported on the fleet fiasco last summer when we learned that some old war ships were being used for Navy target practice, or being sunk to form artificial reefs, before they were stripped of their valuables. Radar, communications devices, kitchen equipment and other machinery were being sent to Davy Jones' Locker without so much as a fare-thee-well. Pentagon investigators estimated the loss at $17 million. The Navy has started a pilot program to strip the ships. But the Defense Department Inspector General's Office now thinks another $40 million will be deep-sixed with the scheduled sinking of 64 old ships under Maritime Administration control.
A Maritime Administration spokesman said it is more costly to strip the ships than sink them untouched. When the agency isn't sinking ships that should be stripped and keeping ships that should be scrapped, it makes bad trades for more ships. One source told us that the agency often acquires ships that have already been slated for the scrap heap by their owners. In 1988, the agency traded a $7.2 million aircraft carrier for a $2.1 million cargo ship.