After A Gallant Sortie, Navy Shipbuilders Are Ready To Build New Hospital Ships

With America’s two aged hospital ships taking center stage in America’s response to the Coronavirus Pandemic, savvy navalists are eager to exploit this unmatched opportunity to recapitalize America’s hospital ship fleet. But what should America’s next hospital ships look like?

America has several viable options to replace the aging and imperfect Mercy Class hospital ships. There are plenty of vessels and established design that are ready to help America project biomedical support forward.

How To Improve The Mercy Class?

The Mercy class was a product of the eighties, when war planners envisioned massive conventional conflict. As such, the ships were super-sized. And while the prospect of massive casualties from conventional conflict cannot be denied, the Mercy class is simply too big for the job.

Certainly, the medical support offered aboard each Mercy class hospital ship is unparalleled. The dozen operating rooms, a 1,000-bed hospital facility and assorted other complex biomedical goodies make for an incredible floating medical asset. But, in actual operations, the thousand hospital beds aboard each ship are needed very, very rarely. More often than not, the Mercy class hospital ships are sent out, manned to staff only a quarter of the available medical beds aboard ship.

Complicating matters, the ships are too big for the available maritime infrastructure. Aside from the fact that the Mercy class hospital ships are some of the more maladroit vessels afloat, easily buffeted by winds and currents, the old modified oil tankers are also unable to fit into most harbors. Even if they do manage to squeeze into the few harbors able to accept them, it is often even harder to find a berth capable of accepting the enormous vessels.  

If the Mercy class hospital ships are unable to tie up to a pier, the ships struggle to accept patients. With no well deck, boats must maneuver alongside the hulking tanker, subjecting potential patients to a potentially dangerous transfer. On the upper deck, the hospital ships have a single helicopter spot—with no hangar—that is unable to accept all the rotary wing platforms in America’s maritime arsenal.

Another weakness—that will become a focus as the COVID-19 deployments progress—is that the ships are unable to easily accommodate infectious or contaminated patients.

What Are The Options?

One interesting option for a modern hospital ship would be the repurposing of an LPD Flight II Navy design. A cheaper variant of the existing San Antonio (LPD-17) class amphibious transport dock, these big 25,000-ton ships, if dedicated to a hospital role, can merge a right-sized ship with a high-end hospital, a well deck (where small craft can sail into the ship to load and off-load) and an enormous flight deck. As a derivative of a survivable warship, capabilities to safely handle infectious or contaminated victims can easily be built into the base design.

The only problem is cost. LPD Flight II ships are projected to cost about $1.8 billion dollars apiece.

A second option is to explore smaller ships—practically floating ambulances—built along similar lines as the old PCE[R] escort patrol craft of World War II. These little 185-foot, 57-bed floating ambulances could be built in numbers and used in a wide array of situations. But small ships come with their own particular challenges—they are unstable in even moderate seas, have limited medical resources, and cannot be sustained at sea for long periods of time.

A third option can come from modified mid-sized merchant ships. While not derived from a military lineage, modern mid-sized merchant ships are stable in high sea states, relatively fast, maneuverable, and can be easily modified. Some design proposals offer large flight decks, capable of accepting V-22 Ospreys or other heavy helicopters. Big and stable enough to safely accommodate high-tech davits needed launch and recover small craft with personnel aboard, a wide range of merchant platforms have potential to serve as modern floating hospitals. Larger variants can carry almost the same medical capabilities as the Mercy class, packaging those massive biomedical resources in a far smaller platform. Conversion costs are reasonable as well, with some companies proposing conversions for under $200 million dollars.

Conversions might seem the best, most cost-effective option, but there are few U.S.-made hulls that would suit. That is a problem; even in the best of times and with the best of justifications, Congress is loath to fund any conversion of foreign vessels for naval service.

That obstacle might make a merchant conversion a non-starter. But the unique circumstances posed by the Coronavirus Pandemic offer an unparalleled opportunity for America’s shipbuilding industry. Though building mid-sized merchant ships in the United States has long been seen as a costly non-starter, the epic sortie of America’s hospital ship fleet may offer just enough of a justification for Congress—if asked—to fund the domestic construction of mid-sized merchant ships—future hospital ships—in a U.S. shipyard. This last, dramatic mission of America’s aged hospital ships is an opportunity the Navy—and potentially the Department of Transportation—must waste no time to exploit.