The U.S. Navy’s greatest weakness in a war with China may not be losing ships — but getting them back into the war.
RAND releasing A recent report warns that the US Navy faces serious risks to its naval dominance because repairing battle-damaged Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in a hostile Indo-Pacific theater is significantly more complex and difficult than current military plans allow.
Based on a two-day tabletop combat exercise sponsored by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and held in August 2025, defense experts from the US and regional allies – including Japan, South Korea and Australia – simulated conflict vignettes against China to assess strategic ship rescue and force regeneration capabilities.
The analysis revealed critical bottlenecks in industrial ship repair, finding that the US Navy’s organic capabilities are inadequate for major repairs and can stabilize ships only to the point where they can transit to the US.
Repairs are further crippled by a severe shortage of specialized technicians and a rigid peacetime regulatory framework that hampers emergency wartime operations.
Additionally, barriers to technology sharing and non-standardized, “snowflake” configurations of individual Aegis combat systems make it nearly impossible to replace or cannibalize parts.
This lack of specialized spare parts is compounded by the extreme physical vulnerability of Allied shipyards to enemy attack and trade restrictions in regional centers such as Singapore.
Together, these factors threaten to leave damaged American warships stranded and vulnerable during an active campaign.
The US Navy’s battle damage repair capabilities may not be limited to the Arleigh Burke class of destroyers. A US Government Accountability Office (GAO) REPORT as of June 2021 states that the US Navy is still in the early stages of developing the capabilities needed to repair battle damage in great power conflicts.
The GAO report says the U.S. Navy lacks an established wartime doctrine, has fragmented planning authority over which to oversee repair and maintenance efforts, and faces major shipyard capacity shortages because it has not had to repair damaged warships on a scale not seen since World War II.
Compounding these weaknesses, the report says the US Navy relies on outdated ship survivability models, leaving it without the reliable data on modern failure points needed to accurately analyze battle damage repair needs.
Additionally, Michael Hogan mentions in a May 2025 ITEM for the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) that post-Cold War downsizing reduced the U.S. Navy’s auxiliary fleet to just three ocean-going tugs, two salvage vessels, and two submarine tenders, driving its repair capabilities into decline and leaving it unable to withstand unexpected battle damage during wartime.
According to Hogan, US public shipyards are already operating at maximum capacity, and routine peacetime modernization means that less than 40% of maintenance periods are completed on time. He points out that with a massive bottleneck in shipbuilding, the US faces a crippling capacity deficit compared to China, leaving forward-deployed warships highly vulnerable in a conflict.
Illustrating the US Navy’s massive shipbuilding deficit vis-à-vis China, the War Zone (TWZ) reported in June 2023, a leaked US Navy reconnaissance slide revealed that China possesses a staggering 232 times the US’s shipbuilding capacity.
Slide said China’s state-owned yards produce a massive capacity of about 23.25 million gross tons, compared with less than 100,000 tons domestically for the US.
Additionally, Arjun Vohra mentions in a Geopolitical Monitor ITEM this month that the US today maintains only eight military installations, a far cry from its powerful World War II industrial base.
Vohra points out that because modern destroyers take 5 to 7 years to build, compressing wartime timelines is nearly impossible, forcing the US Navy to rely heavily on refurbishing older ships rather than building new ones.
Against this background, China’s marine repair enterprise is evolving in the opposite direction. Comparing China’s approach to naval shipbuilding and repair with that of the US, a RAND REPORT This month mentions that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is moving to a hybrid maintenance framework, balancing the replacement of aging hulls with comprehensive overhauls of its newest, highly sophisticated surface combatants.
The report says that to sustain its breakneck pace of shipbuilding, China places high priority on organic, grassroots self-sufficiency, although its lower-level units still struggle with surface-level practices and rely on higher levels for complex repairs.
He notes that this strategy stands in direct contrast to the US Navy’s long-standing repair-focused approach, which remains severely hampered by domestic shipyard bottlenecks, compounding maintenance backlogs and critical manpower shortages.
A report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). cautions that the lack of rapid repair capabilities has reduced the US Navy to the point of operating merely as a “garrison force,” dependent on a forward network of ports and bases rather than the true expeditionary force it was during World War II.
He warns that in a protracted war of attrition against an adversary like China, this destruction would be catastrophic. Lacking mobile repair assets and flexible augmentation capacity to triage stricken ships, the US Navy faces a steep decline in operational availability and a dramatically higher loss rate of salvageable warships, the report says.
These deficiencies may be particularly important in a Taiwan emergency. A January 2023 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) REPORT mentions that a possible Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan would inflict catastrophic losses on the US Navy, typically sinking two US carriers and 10 to 20 large surface combatants within three weeks, losses that could damage US global standing for years.
Reversing these shortfalls will require more than additional funding – it will require a fundamental change in the way the US Navy prepares to regenerate wartime combat power.
William Arnest writes in a March 2025 Proceeding ITEM that, to recoup heavy post-Cold War capability investments, the US Navy must shift from peacetime efficiency metrics to a wartime framework focused on rapid force regeneration through a tiered triage matrix that prioritizes quick, mission-critical fixes over full restoration.
Arnest seeks to accelerate the procurement of Navajo-class salvage vessels and next-generation submarine tenders, using existing fast expeditionary transports as repair platforms and deploying expeditionary mobile maintenance and repair facilities (EMRF).
He adds that the US Navy must have a flag-level champion within the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) staff to bridge organizational structural divides and secure vital funding. Whether the US can sustain naval power in the Indo-Pacific may ultimately depend less on the number of warships it fields than on how quickly it can return damaged ones to combat.
Unless the US rebuilds the industrial, logistical, and organizational foundations of wartime naval resilience, China’s growing advantages in shipbuilding and force regeneration could increasingly shape the strategic balance in any protracted conflict.
