USS Gridley heads for 2-year overhaul after back-to-back deployments

The U.S. Navy has awarded Vigor Marine a $222.5 million contract to overhaul and modernize the destroyer USS Gridley (DDG 101), taking the warship out of service for about two years after nearly back-to-back deployments to the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific and Latin America. The work, which the U.S. Navy calls a fiscal 2027 Depot Modernization Period, will be done at Vigor’s yard in Seattle, Washington, and is scheduled to finish by December 2028, with options that could raise the contract’s value to $232.5 million.

About $207.1 million of the funding, or 93 percent, comes from fiscal 2027 other procurement, Navy funds, the account used to buy and install new systems on ships already in service, and another $2 million comes from fiscal 2026 procurement funds, so most of the money is going to new equipment. Only $13.4 million, or 6 percent, comes from operations and maintenance funds, which pay for routine repair, and that portion expires at the end of the current fiscal year.

The contract announcement covers all labor, equipment, production, testing and quality assurance for a Chief of Naval Operations availability for “critical modernization, maintenance, and repair programs,” but it does not name the systems Vigor will install. Vigor Marine is headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and the contract is managed by the Program Acquisition Executive Maritime in Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Navy limited competition for the job under 10 U.S.C. 3204(a)(3), a provision that allows an agency to restrict competition in order to keep a supplier available for industrial mobilization during a national emergency. The authority lets the U.S. Navy keep private repair yards in business near its fleet concentrations, and Vigor’s Seattle yard is one of the few private facilities in the Pacific Northwest that can take on a destroyer of this size.

The new contract is about six times larger than Vigor’s last job on the same ship, a $37.4 million maintenance and modernization contract awarded in February 2023 for work at Everett, Washington, the destroyer’s homeport, that was due to finish that October.

Gridley returned to Naval Station Everett on Dec. 12, 2025, after a nine-month deployment with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in the U.S. 5th and 7th Fleet areas, and was back at sea two months later. In February 2026, the destroyer deployed to U.S. Southern Command to escort the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68) around South America under Operation Southern Seas, joining the strike group’s April port visit to Valparaíso, Chile, before shifting in June to Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military’s counter-narcotics campaign in the Western Hemisphere.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth visited the ship on Aug. 13 while it was pierside in Panama City, Panama, during the Panamax 2026 exercise, as Gridley prepared to transit the Panama Canal for operations in the Eastern Pacific with Joint Task Force-Western Hemisphere. The destroyer was carrying a U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement detachment and helicopters from Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 73.

“The defense of the Homeland lives on the USS Gridley,” said Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Gridley is a Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer built by Bath Iron Works in Maine and commissioned in 2007 in Miami, the first U.S. Navy commissioning held in that city. Flight IIA ships added a hangar for two MH-60R helicopters that earlier Arleigh Burke destroyers lacked, and they carry 96 Mk 41 vertical launch cells for Standard Missile, Tomahawk and Evolved Sea Sparrow missiles. At almost 20 years old, Gridley is reaching the midpoint of its planned 40-year service life, when the U.S. Navy usually schedules its largest destroyer modernization periods.

Destroyer maintenance has run well behind schedule for years, according to a December 2025 Congressional Budget Office report. It projected that Arleigh Burke-class destroyers will spend more than nine years, or 27 percent of their planned service life, in maintenance, more than twice as long as the U.S. Navy estimated in its 2012 class plans. The CBO found that only 4 percent of destroyer overhauls finished within the time estimated in those plans, and that maintenance events often ran 20 to 100 percent longer than even the U.S. Navy’s final schedules.

Other Flight IIA destroyers are going through similar long modernization periods, including USS Pinckney (DDG 91), which is set for depot work through 2028 as the first ship to receive the full DDG MOD 2.0 upgrade with the SPY-6(V)4 radar.