There are not enough Merchant Marines for the U.S. Navy to fully man 17 vessels, reportedly causing officials to plan to take them out of regular operation.

The Merchant Marines organization, made up of civilian mariners managed by a combination of federal government and the private sector, has lost too much manpower to “properly crew and operate ships across the fleet,” Fox News reported. 

“The problem, of course, is the ships are at sea, away from home port 12 months of the year,” Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation for the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, said. 

While they are not officially members of the U.S. military, Merchant Marines are operators of commercial ships who also serve as an auxiliary during wartime or in a national emergency, according to the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Maritime Administration.

According to Montgomery, “We’re desperately short of the number of people.”

“There’s a lack of experienced merchant mariners to crew the ships, and this is really a clear danger to national security,” he added.

The Navy’s Military Sealift Command (MSC) has planned to put 17 ships into “extended maintenance,” the U.S. Naval Institute reported Thursday.

Sources told the news organization that MSC has scheduled “two Lewis and Clark replenishment ships, one fleet oiler, a dozen Spearhead-class Expeditionary Fast Transports (EPF) and two forward-deployed Navy expeditionary sea bases” for “force generation reset,” and to have their crews redistributed to other ships. 

Montgomery stressed that the issue mostly affects Merchant Marines. 

“The sailors tend to man our warships … the merchant mariners man something that’s equally important, which is the logistics backbone of the Navy — oilers, ammo ships, transports ships that move the Army and Marine Corps across the water,” Montgomery told Fox.

“Just like 90 percent of trade is done by ships and not aircrafts, the same thing applies at sea: It’s too difficult, too expensive — it’s not sufficient to move all that stuff by aircraft, so it’s moved by ships.”