Pinned post for Q&A :)

I grew near the Suisun Bay Mothball fleet---back in the 70's there were rows and rows of warships.....was in my boat watching as they brought in USS Iowa 20 years ago....all gone now. Used to anchor right off the Iowa to fish and just stare in amazement.....got up the nerve to accidently drift close enough to touch the hull once :)

I had the dubious honor of being "in charge" of the mothballed fleet in Philly when the government shut down for 3 weeks at the end of '95 when they sent all the civilians home. And by "in charge", I mean I'd be the guy they pointed fingers at if any of the ships started burning, exploding, sinking or being disagreeable. As a retired CPO, I still think I shoulda gotten a command pin or something for having my neck on the block like that... :) Though it was kinda neat having Des Moines as my personal flagship.

That's a really bad way to play battleships

Why not lease a large number of the reserve navy & air force assets to the US defence partners; Australia, India, Japan, Canada, UK for deployment in South China Sea, Indian Ocean, South Pacific, while those countries await the fulfilment of existing orders for new equipment. That way the USA turns a cost into a revenue raiser.

As someone who has had to remove Cosmoline from old Russian rifles the thought of having to remove it from an entire ship causes me melancholy that I thought hitherto impossible.

Right off the bat you give the reason that the United States Coast Guard is the US's oldest continuously serving sea service! Kudos!

Ahh, the US Reserve Fleet, the second largest navy on earth.

The US Navy has not forgotten how to fool Congress into thinking that they are just modifying existing equipment. The F-18E/F Super Hornet is the F-18C/D cockpit forward attached to a entirely new airframe that sort of looks like the original.

How could you get this so wrong? The USN Mothball Fleet exists to keep Mothra away.

Ah, the US Congress. For most of it's existence, the US Navy's worst enemy. sm

Me: how cute. Without the masts, they look like hotels.

In the mid 1960s, I was part of a crew that reactivated a Fletcher class destroyer to be sold to Turkey. The ship had been in reserve since 1946, or about 20 years. The interior was much like it had been in 1946. Outside there was a lot of light rust and some deeper rust in decks where water had collected. Some ships still in reserve had much more rust. The navy didn't do any rust maintenance I could see on ships smaller than cruisers. In 1970 I saw several troop transports scrapped. On the outside, it was difficult to find paint. Everything was rust.

I had a chance to go aboard Missouri, in 1985, when the ship was being prepared for towing to Long Beach CA. for reactivation. Closed since 1955, we found Plan of the Day sheets taped to bulkheads dated 1955 and they were as fresh as when posted. The galleys were rust free too. The only signs of long closure were some patches of peeling paint due to dryness. After photographing the departure of the ship for Long Beach, I followed it down to become part of the recommissioning crew. I appreciate the care that was taken to keep my battleship in such fine condition. To quote Margaret Truman who spoke at the recommisioning banquet in San Francisco, "Take care of my baby." We did with pleasure.

13.20 I like the way they pulled a fast one on Congress by quietly using money allocated for maintenance to effectively build new ships. But didn't the Royal Navy do something like this in the 1950s when they spent quite a few years modernising HMS Victorious? At the end of the modernisation she was effectively a new carrier. The modernisation reputedly cost more than it would have to build a new carrier, but the politicians would never have sanctioned that.

"Dodgy boiler" -sounds like some very British slang word insult.

I was a member of the decommissioning crew for 2 USN ships- USS Henry B Wilson and USS Barbey. Although the basic procedures were the same for both ships, there were some differences due to what the Navy planned to do with them. The Wilson was used as a target ship, while the Barbey was sold to a foreign navy. Oddly enough, we did far more to the Wilson in cleaning her up than we did for the Barbey. The EPA had to inspect the ship and certify that it could be sunk without being an environmental hazard.

Storing warships for a rainy day? Cloudy, with a chance of 16inch AP shells?

As a child, I remember seeing the USS Shangri La in mothball at anchor, in or near Norfolk, Virginia.

The zoomed-out, black and white pictures of all those ships stacked together brings to mind those plastic model sheets that you have to pull all the pieces off of before you use them.