US Navy Has Only Four Aging Minesweepers Left After Retiring Half the Fleet

The US Navy retired four of its eight Avenger-class minesweeping ships in 2025, leaving just four wooden-hulled minesweepers — all roughly 40 years old — currently docked in Japan. These are the only dedicated mine countermeasures vessels in the entire US fleet. The replacement system, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) mine countermeasures mission package, arrived more than a decade late and came in approximately 70 percent over budget, with the Remote Minehunting Vehicle initially failing on average every eight hours during testing. This matters because the United States cannot clear minefields at any meaningful scale. If an adversary mines a critical chokepoint — the Strait of Hormuz, the Taiwan Strait, the Suez Canal approaches — the US lacks the hulls to respond. Four ships in Japan cannot cover the Indo-Pacific, the Persian Gulf, and European waters simultaneously. A single mining operation in one theater would leave every other theater defenseless against the cheapest asymmetric weapon in naval warfare. The structural reason this persists is that mine warfare has been systematically deprioritized in favor of blue-water power projection platforms like carriers and destroyers. In 2006, the Navy dismantled its Mine Warfare Command entirely, eliminating the institutional home for MCM expertise. Budget decisions since then have consistently favored offensive strike capability over defensive mine clearance, because mines are a defensive and unglamorous mission that offers no career advancement for flag officers. The assumption was that the LCS would handle mine warfare with modular mission packages, but that program failed to deliver for over a decade, creating a gap that no one had institutional incentive to close.