Believe your lyin’ eyes this time. Pictures of rusty underway US Navy warships is evidence.

Another evidence point is the poisoning of Hawaii’s water supply with tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel when a maintenance worker bumped into a cob-job PVC pipe in a tunnel. Thousands of people poisoned and I imagine leaky jet fuel tanks aren’t t great for fleet readiness. The commander who oversaw that disaster was promoted.

Ships get rusty all the time. In fact they get that way every deployment.

That's not evidence that money for maintenance has been redirected.

Prove the money was redirected and that the new funding amount for maintenance is insufficient that it caused the rust you specified, and that the rust levels are greater than other time periods.

You want to me to look at a photo of rust and get mad and then believe you about funding?

Sure, let me whip out the 4000 page defense authorization act for the last decade.

There’s a wide variety of material available from GAO regarding the many issues that the Navy has with maintenance. Feel free to read it.

Would such rust be tolerated if the funds for maintenance were available? Based off what (admittedly little) I know of the military from family members, no. They are generally proud of the aircraft/vessels they serve on, and rust appearing on the deck would be there only because they didn't have the time to remove it (other maintenance) and the funds to re-cover the exposed metal.

That depends on the ships Captain and officers onboard, frankly. If those officers didn’t care, or said they cared but didn’t prioritize the work, instead having everyone run around like crazy doing other things, that’s how you get this.

The captains have enough leeway, they can get the deck stripped and repainted if they prioritized it.

Of course, their commanders provide the environment that allows or requires them to do other things instead.

Probably too many other ‘must do’s’ and other problems.

Speaking from experience on surface ships, no.

If the command gives a rip about its reputation then these things will be addressed first. Everything from swabbing and sweeping decks, high dusting, polishing fittings, etc. It will look immaculate. Only on deployment do these appearance priorities start to drop due to operational concerns or tempo.

But the surface Navy is not a good community and is filled with self-interested officers that are more concerned about progressing their careers than training their people or maintaining their gear. It's why the collisions happened and it's why people died because of those.

The Navy has a huge culture problem in the surface community and until someone with the authority to address it decides to, things won't get better.

It's a big factor that led me to leave the Navy and go onto other things.

I'd constantly be trying to do something a different way that I could prove was more effective and be told not to do it.

Anyways that's my two cents on the topic.

The Defense budget hasn’t decreased; and that money’s gotta be going somewhere.

TFA points out it’s going to prestige projects.

And the money for prestige projects is being siphoned off for the F-35 ?

Don’t forget padded contractor invoices.

Which would actually be a very good thing, considering the f-35 is probably the best military asset of the US right now.

Such evidence if existed wouldn't be allowed to be publicly shared without clearance first.

So you're changing the goalposts here and asking for defense of a statement the post doesn't make. The statement was that "the US surface Navy has...been deferring maintenance," not that it was cutting the budget for maintenance.

There is no smoking gun of "aha! you cut funds for needed repairs!" here - just a series of operational and organizational priorities that have resulted in ships being at sea for longer and longer deployments, and resources allocated to prestige projects like carriers, instead of resolving the less sexy issue of manpower, and lack of "work horse" destroyers in the fleet.

ProPublica has a good piece going into some of the details of this if you'd like to know more, specifically as it regards the 7th Fleet.

https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...

"just a series of operational and organizational priorities that have resulted in ships being at sea for longer and longer deployments, and resources allocated to prestige projects like carriers, instead of resolving the less sexy issue of manpower, and lack of "work horse" destroyers in the fleet."

I'll assume that's a reasonable take but the person I replied to went for an overly simplistic "government bad" line hence the style of my life