US Navy Has A Maintenance Problem

While the U.S. Navy may still dominate the world's seas, it is coming under increasing pressure to keep its assets ship-shape in the face of China's' growing ocean prowess.

Long-standing maintenance issues must be addressed if Washington wants to keep up its stretched naval power and stack up against China's burgeoning fleets, experts have told Newsweek.

Delays in completing maintenance on U.S. Navy surface vessels, historical cuts to the personnel staffing downsized shipyards and extended periods of deployment all impact just how ready the U.S. Navy can be for challenges on the horizon, despite recent efforts to close these gaps, analysts say.

"The Navy has always had maintenance challenges," said retired Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, professor of practice of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University.

"Maintenance isn't sexy and easily overlooked, but the hallmark of a good navy – of any armed force, really – and vital to maintain operational readiness," said Frederik Mertens, a strategic analyst with the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies. "Maintenance is crucial," he told Newsweek.

The problems aren't uniform. Naval aviation and jets, along with the all-important ballistic missile submarines, are largely exempt, but the same cannot be said for some of the Navy's surface combatants.

Keeping the ballistic missile submarines, aircraft carriers and attack submarines operational is a priority, with the surface fleet coming in behind, former U.S. Navy Surface Warfare Captain Bradley Martin, now a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation think tank, told Newsweek.

But as the military zeroes in on Beijing's only-increasing capabilities, the U.S. Navy cannot forget the very basics of how to look after its fleets. Newsweek has reached out to the U.S. Navy for comment via email.

U.S. Navy: 'Hideously overstretched'

The U.S. Navy "has too few ships to do everything it needs to do," Mertens said, adding: "If you look at deployment cycles, it is hideously overstretched."

"There are two carrier task forces in and around the Middle East trying to keep a lid on any further escalation," he said, "but at the same time the USN is exercising with two other carrier task forces and local allies around the South China Sea."

After Hamas's shock October 7 attacks on Israel, the U.S. relocated its USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean. The nuclear-powered USS Gerald R. Ford, with its eight squadrons of attack and support aircraft, was accompanied by a guided-missile cruiser and several guided-missile destroyers.

The U.S. military also moved a number of fighter jets into the region, including F-16s. The Ford was joined shortly after by a second U.S. carrier strike group, led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. The USS Carl Vinson and USS Ronald Reagan carrier strike groups recently completed joint drills in the Philippine Sea, military officials said.

Even with a number of other carriers making up the U.S.'s 11 carrier strike groups, each "[needs] short and deep maintenance, rest and refit, training to be fully up to speed again and what more," Mertens said. "Having one in three immediately available is pushing it; one out of four is more realistic if you wish to keep everything running smoothly– so four out of eleven is really pushing it."

The U.S. Navy's 'unmatched power'

This is not to say the U.S. Navy has lost its formidable power. During the second half of the 20th century, no enemy navy could, nor has since, come close to what a US Navy carrier strike group can bring to bear, Mertens said.

Only London and Paris can compare, but they have "nothing like the quantity the USN enjoys," he said. Yet keeping this up "imposes an intense strain" on the world's most powerful navy, he added.

Delays, slashing down shipyard capacity and a falling number of specialized workers had cut away at how much maintenance could be done, Martin told Newsweek. "The Navy has been working to rectify this situation over time, but we are again facing a situation where the current force might not be ready for some very plausible near-term challenges," he previously told Naval News.

But opinions differ. The types of maintenance and readiness challenges the Navy contends with today "are probably no more challenging than they've been several times in the past couple of decades," Murrett said.

"The U.S. Navy is still in very good shape," he said, despite the ever-present challenges of sustaining a large naval force. "But those are not new issues," he commented, adding the naval forces "can handle multiple contingencies at the same time."

And China?

This is all framed by China's ambitions on the world's seas. China has tipped significant resources into developing its Navy, swelling its size in a few short years—and it shows few signs of slowing down.

The U.S. is acutely aware of China's status as "numerically the largest navy in the world" with 370 ships and submarines, as per the Pentagon's annual report on the Chinese military, released last month. According to the U.S. assessment, China has more than 140 major surface combatants in play and last year launched its third aircraft carrier.

An "ascendent" China has "eclipsed Russia substantially" in many of its naval capabilities, Murrett said. Beijing could "credibly challenge" the U.S. Navy in a way Russia is not able to now, Martin added.

Some analysts are less worried than others. "The network of bases and partnerships the U.S. has around the world, and its familiarity with operating globally, is still leagues ahead of what China can do," according to Bryden Spurling, senior research leader for defense and security, at the European branch of the RAND think tank. "And it's arguable whether China will be able to match it in the future, even if they would like to do so," he told Newsweek in late October.

And the US Navy isn't the only one with maintenance to worry about. "This will really start hurting the Russians in the Black Sea," Mertens predicted. Exhausted and depleted from the 21-month-old grueling war in Ukraine, its surface fleet is in poor shape—although its submarines remain formidable, as does Moscow's nuclear arsenal.

"The use of Sevastopol for maintenance has become far too dangerous and the Russian other ports aren't equipped as this great naval base," he said. Sevastopol, on the west side of southern Crimea, has become a frequent target of Ukraine's navy, imperiling Russian assets close to mainland Ukraine's littoral waters.

"If Turkey keeps the straits closed, the Russian Black Sea Fleet will find itself in a real pickle when the lack of maintenance will come to bite," he said.