Amphibious warship USS Boxer (LHD-4) has left the Western Pacific and is expected to make a port call to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, before returning to San Diego, USNI News has learned.
Boxer is expected to arrive in Hawaii later today, a Navy official told USNI News, for a port call ahead of a transit to Naval Station San Diego, Calif., and the return of 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit elements to Camp Pendleton. Boxer left U.S. 7th Fleet over the weekend, an official told USNI News.
The big deck’s return to California marks the end of an abbreviated deployment that began in July after the ship was sidelined in April for three months of emergent repairs to fix a rudder that failed just days into its deployment.
Following the pier side repair, Boxer traveled to the Western Pacific and drilled with U.S. allies in the South China Sea and assisted in humanitarian aid in October in the Philippines following the landfall of Typhoon Krathon.
Boxer’s planned return will wrap a disjointed deployment that saw the three-ship Amphibious Ready Group leave across several months. Amphibious transport dock USS Somerset (LPD-25) deployed in January to the Indo-Pacific and returned to San Diego in August after participating in the Rim of the Pacific 2024 exercise in Hawaii.
In April, USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49) left for deployment, which was a first for the embarked Amphibious Combat Vehicles. Harpers Ferry delivered the vehicles to the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit in Okinawa and exercised across the Western Pacific.
The delay of Boxer’s deployment and subsequent repair problems became a prime of example of the Navy and Marine Corps mismatch between the supply of amphibious warships to meet the needs of the Marine Expeditionary Units.
During the deployment delay, the Navy and Marine Corps agreed to baseline definitions of readiness to better coordinate Marine training with the availability of amphibious warships to transport the MEUs.
“The obvious 800-pound gorilla in the room is the state of the amphibs,” retired Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, then the Marine deputy commandant for combat development and integration, said earlier this year.
“We have over 20 years of operations in the Middle East and [U.S. Central Command],” he added. “We’ve ground our forces up pretty good, right. We flew the paint off our aircraft. We drove the paint off the bottom of the hulls of the ships. I mean, we just kept going without really due regard of what needed to be done and now we’re paying for it.”
Once back in San Diego after its four-month deployment, Boxer is set to enter an 18-month availability that will begin next year.
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