United States Navy reserve fleets

The United States Navy maintains a number of its ships as part of a reserve fleet, often called the "Mothball Fleet". While the details of the maintenance activity have changed several times, the basics are constant: keep the ships afloat and sufficiently working as to be reactivated quickly in an emergency.

In some cases (for instance, at the outset of the Korean War), many ships were successfully reactivated at a considerable savings in time and money. The usual fate of ships in the reserve fleet, though, is to become too old and obsolete to be of any use, at which point they are sold for scrapping or are scuttled in weapons tests.

In rare cases, the general public may intercede for ships from the reserve fleet that are about to be scrapped – usually asking for the Navy to donate them for use as museum ships, memorials, or artificial reefs.

In November 1976, the controlling organization was the Inactive Ship Division of the Naval Ship Systems Command.^[1] As of 2011, the controlling organization actually appears to be the Inactive Ships Management Office of the Program Executive Officer - Ships, Naval Sea Systems Command, Portsmouth, Virginia.^[2]

Merchant ships held in reserve are managed as part of the separate National Defense Reserve Fleet within MARAD (US Maritime Administration). Several of its sites, such as at Suisun Bay in California, are also used to store regular Navy ships.

Around 1912, the Atlantic Reserve Fleet and the Pacific Reserve Fleet were established as reserve units with still operating ships, but on a greatly reduced schedule.

After the Second World War, with hundreds of ships no longer needed by a peacetime navy, each fleet consisted of a number of groups corresponding to storage sites, each adjacent to a shipyard for easier reactivation. For example, USS Brock (APD-93) was underway for Green Cove Springs, Florida, on 11 April 1945. Brock arrived there on 13 April 1945, and joined the Florida Group, 16th Fleet, which later became the Florida Group, Atlantic Reserve Fleet.

Many of the deactivated World War II merchant vessels were of a class called Liberty ships which were mass-produced ocean-going transports used primarily in the convoys going to/from the U.S., Europe, and Russia. Liberty ships were also used as the navy's support vessels for its fleet of warships and to ferry forces across the Pacific and Atlantic.

Most Liberty ships when deactivated were put into "mothball fleets" strategically located around the coasts of the U.S., or sold into commercial service. They began to be deactivated and scrapped in the early 1970s.

A Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility (NISMF) is a facility owned by the U.S. Navy as a holding facility for decommissioned naval vessels, pending determination of their final fate. All ships in these facilities are inactive, but some are still on the Naval Vessel Register, while others have been struck from that Register.

• The Ready Reserve Force (RRF) is a subset of ships in MARAD's National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF). Ready Reserve Force supports the rapid worldwide deployment of U.S. military forces.^[6]

• 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, a U.S. Air Force equivalent