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YTBs Fade Away
January 1, 2008: Soon, the U.S. Navy will lose another entire
class of ships. These are the YTBs (Yard Tug Big), which are the military
equivalent of the civilian tugs you see in any large port. The YTBs have been
around for over a century. The last military ones built, in 1975, were about
110 feet long and displaced 350 tons. In the 1980s, the navy realized it would
be cheaper to outsource the tug jobs (moving large warships and support ships
into and out of docks, and moving barges of supplies around). For one thing,
civilian tugs were more modern, and efficient. A navy tug had a crew of twelve,
a similar size civilian tug had only four sailors on board. Despite the increasing breakdown rate of the
remaining 30 tugs, the navy has not been able to scrape together the money to
build new ones. If this is not done in the next 10-15 years, the existing ones
will all be out of action and no YTBs will be available. This will cause
problems in foreign ports, where you can't always depend on the locals to
forget politics and just move the damn ships. In the United States, portions of
some bases are highly classified, and getting civilian tug crews with the
appropriate security clearances might be difficult.
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