If war broke out in the western Pacific tomorrow, how would U.S. Navy ships be supplied and repaired? Given China’s copious inventory of long-range missiles, virtually every Navy installation in the region could be attacked.1 During a conflict, none of the United States’ handful of regional bases could service the Seventh Fleet without risking ships being sunk in port. Similarly, replenishment ships, which load fuel and supplies out of those ports and deliver them to ships underway, could not do so without facing the same risk. The Navy’s entire supply chain could be forced to move thousands of miles to the east, to Hawaii, or even worse, to the West Coast of the United States.
Meanwhile, China’s supply chain would remain about 70 nautical miles long, the width of the Taiwan Strait at its narrowest point. As soon as the missiles started flying, as many forward-deployed U.S. ships as possible would get underway and stay underway, leaving their homeports far behind. If the Navy expects to keep those ships underway and operational, it should revive a battle-tested capability from a time when the Navy’s control of the seas was similarly not assured—the destroyer tender.2
The Logistical Challenge in the Western Pacific
In October 2022, the Navy conducted the latest in a series of vertical launch system reloading tests between an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer and a Military Sealift Command ship.3 The pierside exercise was designed to demonstrate an “expeditionary ordnance reload” capability far removed from existing ammunition onload/offload sites, which are primarily pierside. As many observers have pointed out, U.S. Navy ships equipped with Mk 41 vertical launch systems carry a limited number of missiles, which would be expended quickly in wartime.4 During a conflict, a ship that has expended its ordnance would have to steam thousands of miles from the fight to reload, thereby removing it from the theater for at least a month.
The problem, however, goes far beyond ordnance reload. Ships require an enormous supply chain to remain underway.5 This logistical infrastructure provides food, fuel, and ordnance. It also is critical for the repair parts needed to keep ships operational. The Navy keeps most of its repair parts in a limited number of Defense Logistics Agency distribution centers located in the continental United States.6 Often, the Navy’s inventory of repair parts is kept quite low, especially for the most expensive parts. This is the result of decades of cost-saving measures predicated on the supposed efficiencies of just-in-time logistics.
When ships are in port, parts are mailed commercially to deployed ships. This can take weeks. When ships are underway, the delivery of repair parts (along with anything else the ship needs) relies on replenishments with the closest supply ship and the port from which that supply ship loads out. Or, if the ship is part of a carrier strike group, parts can be delivered by carrier onboard delivery aircraft. If a ship cannot get important parts in time, they might be cannibalized from other ships in long-term maintenance. And when a ship’s crew is unable to repair a piece of equipment, the Navy relies heavily on depot-level installations such as the ship repair facility in Yokosuka, Japan.
This logistical model is not going to work well in wartime. It often barely keeps ships underway in peacetime, even with the superb expediting services of the Navy’s Priority Material Office. The current model depends entirely on fixed, shore-based logistical infrastructure. This includes the commercial logistics companies that ship most repair parts, the airports that receive those parts, the ports in which supply ships are loaded, and the ship repair facilities themselves. None of these is going to be reliably available in wartime.
Tenders to the Rescue
To mitigate these risks, the Navy should recapitalize destroyer tenders in the fleet. The last destroyer tenders in service were prematurely retired in the mid-1990s as part of the post–Cold War defense budget drawdown.7 This was one of many decisions concerning the Navy’s force structure made in the 1990s and 2000s that have left the Navy strategically incoherent and adrift at exactly the moment it might be called on to fight a war at sea with a peer competitor for the first time since World War II.8
Tenders bring many advantages, including:
Vertical launch system (VLS) reloading and maintenance. As many have argued, tenders could provide an expeditionary ordnance reload capability in protected harbors when fixed ammunition onload/offload sites in Japan or Guam become unavailable.9 It is unclear whether the Navy’s next-generation logistics ship, being developed for production starting in 2026, will have this capability.10 In addition to the need to reload cells, VLS modules also require depot-level maintenance after a certain number of missiles have been fired. While this maintenance today is performed infrequently, as the Navy does not fire many missiles in peacetime, in combat this requirement would increase significantly. It might be possible for a tender to carry this work out.
Forward logistics hub. Tenders could serve as mobile and distributed logistics hubs, putting critical repair parts in the theater where they are needed and not stuck in depots thousands of miles away. This would require an increase in the stock of many repair parts. A tender’s supply of repair parts would not be a cache never to be used during peacetime. A ship is a complex system-of-systems. The allowance parts list for a given ship is constantly changing as more reliable parts are developed and ship systems are upgraded, making any static cache quickly outmoded.
Intermediate maintenance facility. Tenders could serve as what the Navy terms intermediate maintenance facilities—repair facilities one step below that of depot-level, staffed primarily by sailors who have the training, tools, and resources needed to make repairs the ship’s crew cannot accomplish on their own. This would include technical experts who could troubleshoot problems (such as marine gas turbine inspectors), the ability to manufacture common parts on site, and specialty equipment needed for services such as calibration.
Port services. Many of the ports or protected harbors the Navy might end up using in a conflict do not have the services necessary to support warships. Ships in port or anchored in a protected harbor are unable to discharge sewage or make their own fresh water through reverse osmosis. Without shore power, ships also are forced to “auxiliary steam” (run gas-turbine generators) to generate electricity, burning fuel. While the Navy should invest in constructing infrastructure in such ports in advance of a conflict, and the Civil Engineer Corps (Seabees) would undoubtedly be tasked with rapidly building up port infrastructure during such a conflict (as it famously did in World War II), tenders could provide a stopgap when port infrastructure and services are lacking.
Unmanned surface vessels (USVs). Finally, tenders could service and repair USVs. While it has only begun to field these systems, the Navy envisions introducing a wide variety of unmanned, optionally manned, or minimally manned surface vessels by the end of this decade.11 Forcing these vehicles to return to existing Navy ports for servicing and repair would be suboptimal and potentially impossible given the distances involved in the Pacific. Requiring amphibious ships or expeditionary sea bases to service and repair USVs would also be suboptimal, as such ships would have their own missions and maintenance workload to complete, and neither ship type was designed with servicing and repairing USVs in mind.
Reestablishing a Tender Fleet
Given the Navy’s anemic shipbuilding program, even if the service did decide design and acquire new destroyer tenders, it is unrealistic to expect them to be fielded quickly. The Navy could shorten the timeline a little by modifying existing ship designs for new construction, retrofitting Military Sealift Command ships, or piggybacking on the contract to replace the Navy’s two aging submarine tenders.12 Another concern is that tenders would be highly vulnerable to attack. They have few organic defenses and present an enticing target with all the matériel needed to keep dozens of other ships operational. However, shore-based infrastructure is far more vulnerable than a moving ship.
Destroyer tenders are not a new idea—they are an old and practical one. In the decades following the Cold War, during which the U.S. Navy enjoyed uncontested command of the seas, they were also a luxury, easily discarded as superfluous. This is no longer true. The Navy tells itself that its raison d’etre is to “operate forward.”13 Destroyer tenders enable just that.
1. CDRs Thomas Shugart and Javier Gonzalez, USN, “First Strike: China’s Missile Threat to U.S. Bases in Asia,” Center for New American Security, June 2017.
2. For proposals along similar lines, see David Alman, “Bring Back the Seaplane,” War on the Rocks, 1 July 2020; and LT Jonathan Z. French, USN, “Bring Back the Dirigibles, Maintain the Undersea Advantage,” U.S. Naval Institute Naval History 37, no. 2 (April 2023).
3. Gidget Fuentes, “Navy Tests Reloading Missiles on Destroyer in San Diego Bay, Open Ocean Tests Tougher Task,” USNI News, 18 October 2022.
4. Bryan Clark, “Commanding the Sea: The U.S. Navy and the Future of Surface Warfare,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2017.
5. Edward Lundquist, “Delivering Parts, Fuel, Mail Over 52 Million Square Miles,” Maritime Logistics Professional, 1 July 2019.
6. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Managing DoD’s Spare Parts,” Watchblog, 23 June 2016.
7. Steven Wills, “Tending to a Distributed Maritime Operation: The Ongoing Need for More Navy Tenders,” Center for Maritime Security, 12 September 2023.
8. Steven Wills, “End the Navy’s 30-Year Slide in Capability and Capacity,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 4 (April 2023).
9. Bryan Clark et al., “Restoring American Seapower: A New Fleet Architecture for the United States Navy,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2017.
10. Ronald O’Rourke, Navy Light Replenishment Oiler (TAOL) Program: Background and Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, 12 December 2024.
11. Ronald O’Rourke, Navy Large Unmanned Surface and Undersea Vehicles: Background and Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, 19 December 2024.
12. Richard Scott, “NAVSEA Intends to Award AS(X) Submarine Tender Design Development to NASSCO,” Janes, 17 May 2024.
13. HON Kenneth J. Braithwaite, Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 2020).