
Technical Specifications
Overview
USNS Watkins (T-AKR-315) is one of Military Sealift Command's nineteen Large, Medium-Speed Roll-on/Roll-off Ships and is part of the 33 ships in the Prepositioning Program. She is a Watson-class vehicle cargo ship. She was named for Master Sergeant Travis E. Watkins, a Medal of Honor recipient. Laid down on 24 August 1999 and launched on 28 July 2000, Watkins was put into service in the Pacific Ocean on 2 March 2001. According to The Guardian the human rights group Reprieve identified the Watkins and sixteen other USN vessels as having held "ghost prisoners" in clandestine extrajudicial detention. The Navy announced it would transfer the USNS Watkins on 1 July 2026 to the US Maritime Administration.
Live Tracking
Most time stopped at Vancouver — 41 d across 34 stays.
Derived from the AIS track — runs of near-zero speed (anchored, moored or drifting) snapped to the nearest port. Builds up as we observe the vessel.
Intelligence
Operational Status
Stopped, anchored or moored on its latest broadcast — parked, not necessarily withdrawn.
Read from the single most-recent AIS broadcast we hold for this hull — we keep no position history, so this is a point-in-time posture, not a dwell inference. Derived in-house from our own AIS feed; weight it by the broadcast age above.
Composite Risk
Multiple adverse factors, or a hard ship-specific signal, lift this hull above the fleet norm.
A coverage-weighted blend of the single component we could read for this hull — the weights renormalise over only the components present, so a thin read is never inflated and a hull is never credited a “safe 0” for a signal it has no row for. This headline is flagged low-confidence (a thin or structural-only read) and should not be treated as a verdict. Higher means riskier. Derived in-house from government-open port-State-control, flag, sanctions and our own vessel data; weight it by the coverage above.

Visual Archive
Explore More