Originally Posted by
ExplorerWannabe
I suspect the ships are not kept "ready to go at a moment's notice" like SSBNs.
Right, (in theory) five days according to Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Mercy_(T-AH-19)
We have been tracking this infection wave for weeks. If you have toys, use them! As far as I can tell, no one in the administration even talked about the ships when I first raised the issue. I will fully admit that I am not a navy expert, but we are spending a ton of dollars on building and maintaining these ships - the activation of the ships, like many other measures, seems to be coming very late for no obvious reason.
Comfort is actually not ready to go in five days because they are finishing up maintenance... New York will have to wait longer.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...-harbor-135732
“
The Navy is getting ships crewed and ready to launch, defense officials said. Mercy should be underway in days, but Comfort could take two weeks to deploy because it is still finishing up maintenance, according to chief Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman.”
I suppose one challenge is staffing.
https://news.usni.org/2020/03/17/pen...virus-response
Each ship has a 1,000-bed capacity and is manned by military medical personnel, requiring about a week or more to mobilize those personnel from across the active duty and reserve forces. Pentagon officials have stressed that many of the reserve medical personnel that would be called up to staff mobile hospitals or Mercy and Comfort would be partially pulled from civilian medical facilities.“The big challenge isn’t the availability of these inventories, it’s the medical professionals. All of those doctors and nurses either come from our medical treatment facilities or they come from the reserves, which means civilians,” Esper said.
“What I don’t want to do is take reservists from a hospital where they are needed just to put them on a ship to take them somewhere else where they’re needed.”