The US Navy’s greatest vulnerability in a war with China may not be losing ships — but getting them back into the fight.
RAND released a recent report warning that the US Navy faces severe risks to its maritime 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 wargaming tabletop exercise sponsored by the Joint 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 evaluate strategic ship-salvage and force-regeneration capabilities.
The analysis revealed critical bottlenecks in industrial ship repair, finding that the US Navy’s organic capabilities are insufficient for major repairs and can only stabilize ships to the point that they can transit back to the US.
Repairs are further crippled by a severe shortage of specialized technicians and a rigid peacetime regulatory framework that stalls emergency wartime operations.
Additionally, tech-sharing hurdles and the non-standardized, “snowflake” configurations of individual Aegis combat systems make it nearly impossible to substitute or cannibalize parts.
This lack of specialized spare parts is compounded by the extreme physical vulnerability of allied shipyards to enemy attacks and commercial constraints at regional hubs such as Singapore.
Together, those factors threaten to leave damaged US warships stranded and defenseless during an active campaign.
The US Navy’s battle damage repair capabilities may not be limited to just the Arleigh Burke destroyer class. A US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report from 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 that the US Navy lacks an established wartime doctrine, has fragmented planning on which authority oversees repair and maintenance efforts, and faces severe shipyard capacity shortages, because it hasn’t had to repair damaged warships on a scale not seen since World War II.
Compounding these vulnerabilities, the report says the US Navy relies on outdated ship survivability models, leaving it without reliable data on modern failure points needed to accurately analyze battle damage repair needs.
Furthermore, Michael Hogan mentions in a May 2025 article for the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) that post-Cold War downsizing slashed the US Navy’s auxiliary fleet to just three ocean-going tugs, two rescue ships and two submarine tenders, driving its declining repair capabilities and leaving it unable to handle sudden wartime battle damage.
According to Hogan, US public shipyards are already operating at maximum capacity, and routine peacetime modernization means fewer than 40% of maintenance periods are completed on time. He stresses that with a massive domestic shipbuilding bottleneck, 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-a-vis China, The War Zone (TWZ) reported in June 2023 that a leaked US Navy intelligence slide revealed that China possesses an astonishing 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US.
The slide said China’s state-run shipyards produce a massive capacity of approximately 23.25 million gross tons, compared to less than 100,000 tons domestically for the US.
Moreover, Arjun Vohra mentions in a Geopolitical Monitor article this month that the US today maintains only eight military shipyards, a far cry from its robust 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 retrofitting older vessels rather than building new ones.
Against that backdrop, China’s naval repair enterprise is evolving in the opposite direction. Contrasting 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 transitioning toward a hybrid maintenance framework, balancing the replacement of older hulls with comprehensive overhauls of its newest, highly sophisticated surface combatants.
The report says that to support its breakneck shipbuilding pace, China heavily prioritizes organic, grassroots self-sufficiency, though its lower-level units still struggle with surface-level practices and rely on higher echelons for complex repairs.
It notes that this strategy directly contrasts with the US Navy’s longstanding, repair-focused approach, which remains severely hindered by domestic shipyard bottlenecks, compounding maintenance backlogs and critical workforce shortages.
A Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) report warns that the lack of rapid repair capabilities has diminished the US Navy to the point of functioning as a mere “garrison force,” dependent on a forward network of ports and bases rather than the true expeditionary force it was during World War II.
It warns that in a protracted war of attrition against a peer adversary like China, this decay would be catastrophic. Lacking mobile repair assets and flexible surge capacity to triage struck vessels, the US Navy faces a steep drop in operational availability and a dramatically higher loss percentage of salvageable warships, the report says.
Those shortcomings could be especially consequential in a Taiwan contingency. A January 2023 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report mentions that a potential 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 cripple the US’s global position for years.
Reversing those shortcomings will require more than additional funding — it will require a fundamental shift in how the US Navy prepares to regenerate combat power during wartime.
William Arnest writes in a March 2025 Proceedings article that, to reverse severe post-Cold War capability divestments, the US Navy must transition from peacetime efficiency metrics to a wartime framework focused on rapid force regeneration through a tiered triage matrix that prioritizes quick, mission-essential fixes over full restoration.
Arnest urges accelerating the procurement of Navajo-class salvage ships and next-generation submarine tenders, using existing expeditionary fast transports as repair platforms, and deploying containerized, mobile Expeditionary Maintenance and Repair Facilities (EMRFs).
He adds that the US Navy must have a flag-level champion within the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) staff to bridge structural organizational divides and secure vital funding. Whether the US can sustain maritime power in the Indo-Pacific may ultimately depend less on how many warships it fields than on how quickly it can return damaged ones to the fight.
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 prolonged conflict.
