How many US navy small boats in US inventory?

Answer 1

The US Navy doesn't (and didn't) like small combatants in their inventory; especially wooden ones, like the WWII PT Boats. Close to 300 of those boats were intentionally destroyed (burned) in the Philippines at the close of the war. Wooden boats are a maintenance headache; wood rots, and the maintenance inventory of the US Navy was designed & organized to support steel vessels, not wood.

Secondly, the USN distains small boat combatants. Small boats are necessary for taxing personnel from vessel to vessel and conducting errands in bays, etc. But not the combatants. Combatants such as the WWII MTB (Motor Torpedo Boats-aka PT boats); and the USN's Brown Water Navy in Vietnam, which utilized a host of riverine craft such as the Swift Boats (PCF-Patrol Craft Fast), PBRs (Patrol Boat River), Alpha Boats (ASPB-Assault Support Patrol Boats), and the Monitors were only a "wartime necessity." And all save some PBRs and two Swift Boats were retained in the US (and the Swift Boats were salvaged from scrap yards by some veterans!).

There is no money in small combatants when defense budgets are rationed out to the military. The big money is in "big ticket items" such as warships for the navy, bombers for the air force and tanks for the army. That's where the big money is justified. The army, navy and air force fight for their share of the defense budget each year that it's being offered.

Only lately, since Operation Iraqi Freedom began it's campaign, and then only late in the game, has the US Navy become interested again in small patrol boats. So far, probably no more than a hundred such combatants have been placed into service with the USN. These are not the PTs & Swifts of days gone by, but in some cases inflatibles, and civilian appearing water craft painted up in military schemes. There is no more official Brown Water Navy, just some small patrolling in troubles regions over-seas. Coronado in California is training them, as they did during the Vietnam War; Mare Island used to used old Viet War PBRs (those were all fiberglass), but the Mare Island closed down in '95, and tranferred what they had left to Sacramento. Sacramento is surrounded by rivers.