Winifred Brown/Fort Bliss Public Affairs
- US Army and Marine Corps vehicle fleets aren’t sufficiently ready for war, a watchdog study finds.
- The GAO report highlights a dramatic decline in vehicle readiness due to maintenance and spare parts problems.
- Costs for vehicle repairs have soared, but services are getting less availability in return.
The US Army and Marine Corps are struggling to maintain their combat vehicle fleets and keep them ready for war, with shortages of spare parts and maintainers sidelining many of them, a US government watchdog says.
A new Government Accountability Office report released last week examined nearly a decade of data, finding that of 18 vehicles — including tanks, self-propelled artillery, and armored personnel carriers — 16 were not sufficiently mission capable, or available for operations.
The Army and Marine Corps spent over $2.3 billion combined on high-level ground vehicle maintenance, according to the GAO report. Despite these investments, vehicle readiness plummeted due to insufficient numbers of trained mechanics and diminished manufacturing sources for repair parts, with single-source suppliers often becoming chokepoints.
The watchdog report highlighted the limitations of vehicle availability for any potential mission, noting that mission-capable rates have declined since 2015. None of the Army vehicles that inspectors looked at met the Army’s goal of being ready to support a mission 90% of the time in FY 2024.
The GAO reported that between fiscal years 2015 and 2024, per-vehicle maintenance costs for the Abrams tank more than doubled while availability rates were well below target. Fleet-wide maintenance costs for the Army surged almost 50% during this window. That figure dropped for the Corps, but per-vehicle repair costs for a handful of vehicles jumped.
Among the military vehicles studied were also Stryker Combat Vehicles, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, key elements of specific Army brigade combat teams. Each is a rugged vehicle equipped with varied armaments and capable of moving troops across battlefields using wheels or tracks.
“Five of six selected Army ground combat vehicles did not meet mission capable goals in any fiscal year during the time frame of GAO’s review,” the report said. Over the last decade, “selected Army ground support vehicles achieved mission capable goals about 20 percent of the time.”
The Army and Marine Corps did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
Extensive depot overhauls have collapsed, falling from 1,278 in 2015 to just 12 in 2024 while the Marine Corps reduced its overhauls from 725 to 163 over the same period.
A senior Army official told the report authors that “the Army accepted the risk from the decision to reduce funding for overhauls,” the GAO report said. The overhaul cuts hurt mission-capable rates, but the Army mitigated the impact by stripping parts out of vehicles being phased out.
The Marine Corps lacks a specific mission-capable goal for its ground combat vehicles, but mission-capable rates for most of its vehicle fleets have declined since 2015, with only the aging assault amphibious vehicle and light armored vehicles improving as they move closer to being phased out.
In short, the GAO found that while America’s ground forces are pouring more money into maintaining their combat vehicles, they’re getting less availability in return, with readiness rates dropping in a way that could leave units ill-prepared for a fight.
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