The Navy is having maintenance issues.

Remember the post I did asking where all the ships were?

STRATFOR offers updates on US Naval maps free and I've latched onto it the way a sinking man grabs a lifeguard.
This week's map is quite interesting. If I didn't know better (and I don't) it seems like we're seeing a pause in ship deployments. Is this planned? Issues with maintenance? I just don't know.

Well the Free Beacon has the answer. Check this out...

Heavy demand on the Navy’s fleet during the past decade has compromised the operational conditions of many ships, forcing military leaders to sideline these vessels for lengthy repairs that experts say will severely limit the Navy’s ability to respond to emerging threats in the Persian Gulf and Asia-Pacific regions.
Critical maintenance was completed on time on just 11 percent of the Navy’s aircraft carriers in 2015, causing these vessels to lose around 181 deployment days, according to the latest projections by the Government Accountability Office.
The situation is worse for surface combatant ships. Maintenance on these vessels was completed on time in just 28 percent of cases, causing the fleet to lose around 391 total deployment days, according to the GAO latest report.
Military experts told the Washington Free Beacon that the “Navy crunch” is not expected to end anytime soon, raising questions about the United States’ ability to respond on multiple fronts in key conflict zones.
“Adm. Michelle Howard testified this year that only one of the three required Carrier Strike Groups are ready to deploy within a month,” Mackenzie Eaglen, a longtime defense adviser and expert in military readiness, told the Free Beacon.

The Pentagon is in a hurt locker.  Carter is so fixated on his "third offset" that he isn't noticing that the military we have now is being run into the ground.

The Navy is broken and so are the other services.

Maybe its time to take a procurement holiday and simply fix the stuff we have. ISIS isn't that big a threat and all this forward deployment garbage is wearing out men and material at an insane rate.

Its time to bring the troops back from the frontier.