US needs its allies’ help to fix naval ships
Since the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, China has grown in economic and military might. It now has the world’s largest navy and the world’s largest shipbuilding industry and is flexing its muscle. All that has been clear in the way it has harassed and bullied its Indo-Pacific neighbors, from the Philippines to Japan to Taiwan.
Meanwhile, over the same period, chronic maintenance and repair delays, cost overruns, extended sea tours, and construction backlogs have led to an atrophied American fleet and a broken naval industrial base.
There is a smart way out of this mess that will strengthen our defenses and alliances, but it will require Congress and the U.S. Navy to think differently than they have in the past. We need to turn to our allies in the Pacific to be full partners in repairing and maintaining our fleet.
The challenge is severe. Recently, for example, the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, spent two years out of service for a $200 million overhaul, only to then be dogged by continuing (and costly) engineering problems. The necessary repairs rendered Boxer and its 1,200 Marines unable to relieve a sister ship, the USS Bataan, which had been protecting global shipping from Houthi missile and drone attacks off the coast of Yemen.
Bataan’s extended deployment pushed that ship and its crew to their limits. Bataan and its crew of more than 1,200 spent eight months at sea, both in the Strait of Hormuz and later in the Red Sea.
This deployment juggling act is symptomatic of the Navy’s broader struggle to meet its own goal of having 75 “mission-capable” surface ships at any one time. A seafaring force that once ruled the waves has been reduced to cannibalizing parts from its own ships because of supply chain bottlenecks, parts shortages and dysfunctional ship-repair facilities at home.
Meanwhile, the Navy won’t be able to meet its required production goal of two nuclear submarines a year until 2029 at the earliest. With 36% of the submarine fleet either already dry-docked or waiting to be maintained, the Navy is repeatedly missing both construction and repair targets for its entire fleet.
These are not isolated incidents. They are part of a pattern of degeneration and decline. This is a crisis years in the making. It’s now on all of us to abandon long-held views, think originally and fix the problem.
Part of the answer is within reach. While we try to modernize a handful of government-owned shipyards (we have exactly four) in the United States, Japanese and South Korean facilities — which together produce 47% of the world’s ships each year — can help reduce our maintenance and repair backlogs while ensuring we fulfill our collective, in-theater, deterrence agreements with Tokyo and Seoul.
Japan — a steadfast security partner for more than 60 years — and its industrial giants have consistently demonstrated their capacity to deliver high-quality work ahead of schedule and within budget (something U.S. defense firms could learn a thing or two from).
Our ships need to be overhauled where they sail. In this day and age, we cannot afford to have vessels travel thousands of miles back across the Pacific to languish pier-side for years in backlogged U.S. shipyards. The sooner our ships are overhauled, the sooner they return to the fight or deter one. Since the United States, Japan and South Korea train and plan together, it makes sense that we also maintain and repair together.
Besides, every day spent repairing and maintaining ships in our allies’ shipyards means an extra day spent constructing next-generation warships in American yards. A day spent repairing and maintaining ships in theater means a day spent strengthening the projection of our collective deterrence. And a day spent repairing and maintaining ships in Japanese or South Korean yards means a day spent boosting our real-time readiness.
Because the Navy is often the first service to be called upon when a crisis erupts, our ability to project power and fulfill security obligations around the globe is being hampered by a service that has long refused to face its problems or look to allies for help. Not utilizing our allies’ shipyards is a hangover from past policy that needs to change. The U.S. Navy is meeting its repair deadlines only 41% of the time. That just won’t cut it anymore.
It’s time to do things differently and to be honest with ourselves about the problems and solutions. Given the geopolitical challenges we face, it means bigger defense budgets are required. But that alone will not address decades of dysfunction. It also means spending more wisely and more strategically, as we have seen Ukraine successfully do in the Black Sea.
Even if we broke ground on a new U.S. shipyard immediately, it would be another decade or more before it could start producing vessels. In the meantime, Japan and South Korea have abundant, state-of-the-art shipyard capacity ready to take on repair and maintenance work. By leveraging our allies’ industrial strengths, we can keep our Navy sailing and our collective deterrence credible.