After a furor over ship and submarine inspection failures in 2008, Navy brass later that year imposed a blackout on readiness reports, an action that officials maintained was for security concerns and wholly unrelated to the string of failures. The blackout continues to this day/…/
Congress codified the Board of Inspection and Survey in 1882 to ensure that ships are ready for sustained combat; it has continued ever since.
If INSURVs were unclassified throughout the Cold War, when the Navy confronted an advanced, blue-water Soviet navy, then what changed in 2008, asked retired Capt. Jan van Tol, who is now a defense analyst at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C.
Van Tol also questioned Greenert’s explanation that INSURVs should be classified simply because SORTS are classified.
“Whereas the SORTS system reports immediate degradations to equipment and or ability to perform certain missions and is thus inherently classified, INSURVs are done pier-side in a nondeployed status,” van Tol wrote in a email. “Problems will be fixed before deploying.
“This issue will become even more salient if, as projected, deployment lengths increase, the average ship age grows, the maintenance costs for older and harder-run ships mounts, and/or the Navy is forced to accept lower levels of readiness in some areas if sufficient maintenance funds aren’t available in austere times,” van Tol wrote. “That’s something that Congress — and the public — has a legitimate need to know.”