Fix the Navy’s Expeditionary Repair

With 295 ships in the fleet, the U.S. Navy is almost exactly half the size it was at the end of the Cold War.¹ It is numerically smaller than the People’s Liberation Army Navy.² This means that while the service strives to meet the Chief of Naval Operations’ (CNO’s) goal of “getting more ready players on the field by 2027,” sustaining forces in a contested maritime environment is more important than ever.³

The Navy’s Maritime Sustainment Strategy describes five vectors to this end: refuel, rearm, resupply, repair, and revive.⁴ Of those, repair is the least understood and most in need of the Navy’s attention.

Some factors that make repair difficult are relatively simple to understand: a peacetime mindset that expects ships to be fully mission-capable when they deploy; a shortage of organic expeditionary repair capability; and the lack of an effective organizational structure to determine, validate, and fund repair requirements. More insidiously, some myths and faulty assumptions also exist regarding repair—myths that not only are an obstacle to repair, but also make necessary institutional reforms to this sustainment vector more difficult. The Navy needs to address all these issues soon. It must learn to think differently about repair. The service should change how it trains for and carries out repair, and how it determines, validates, and funds repair requirements.

Lessons from the Past

When the Navy conducted large-scale campaigns in the contested maritime environments of World War II, service squadrons (ServRons) made combat forces more effective. ServRons provided all the logistics functions covered by the current maritime sustainment vectors.⁵ They regenerated degraded combat power from bases in the Marshall, Gilbert, Admiralty, and Caroline Islands, thus minimizing time lost to transit.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Navy has divested many of its organic maintenance and repair capabilities. It no longer has destroyer tenders or repair ships. Its floating drydocks are not expeditionary. The Navajo-class rescue and salvage ship (T-ATS) will soon replace fleet ocean tugs (T-ATFs) and rescue and salvage ships (T-ARSs), but units will take time to arrive. Its two submarine tenders, the Navy’s only mobile maintenance and repair assets, were delivered in the 1970s and need replacement. A Government Accountability Office report in 2021 cited the Navy’s degraded ability to perform battle damage assessment and repair, but few of the report’s recommendations have been adopted.⁶ A 2022 article called for the return of expeditionary battle damage repair squadrons.⁷ While the essay was correct that the Navy must recapitalize platforms and reestablish ServRons to regain capabilities it has lost, more platforms and squadrons will not be enough.

During a reorganization of the Chief of Naval Operations’ staff (OpNav), the Fleet Readiness Division—formerly N43 under the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Fleet Readiness and Logistics (N4)—was removed from N4’s cognizance. Its requirements and assessment functions were transferred to the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for the Integration of Capabilities and Resources (N8) and thus became OpNav N83. The budget authority and resource sponsorship for maintenance meanwhile shifted to the platform resource sponsors under the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Warfighting Requirements (N9).⁸ The Navy in this reshuffle lost a major organizational contributor to its past success in fielding a robust, expeditionary, and comprehensive fleet logistics train that included substantial organic repair capability. It is not presently structured to get it back.

Changing How The Navy Thinks on Repair

The Navy peacetime mindset avoids sending partially mission-capable ships into operations. To begin addressing the challenges to repair, the service must develop and implement a framework for rapidly regenerating forces in forward, potentially austere environments. But first, the Navy needs to dispel several myths related to the material readiness of its platforms.

Myth: Repair in a contested maritime environment means battle damage repair.

Fact: Although ships will be damaged in war by enemy weapons or passing debris, components also will fail on their own more often than they do during peacetime, degrading ships’ mission capabilities. Repair will be needed for battle and non-battle damage to keep ships in the fight.

Myth: Preventive maintenance will go out the window in wartime.

Fact: Although wartime conditions (such as a port-starboard battle bill) may preclude scheduled preventive maintenance, either because of a lack of sailors available or system prerequisites (such as securing portions of combat systems for maintenance), some preventive maintenance items will still need to be completed to ensure system functionality and retain mission capabilities.

Myth: Current peacetime practices are sufficient for wartime demands on the maintenance/repair industrial base.

Fact: The demand for maintenance is already greater than the Navy’s capacity to provide it.⁹ If transiting to and from shipyards and ship-repair facilities inside adversaries’ weapons engagement zones is too risky, and the amount of repair work is expected to increase, there is insufficient capacity in U.S.-based repair activities to meet wartime demand.

Myth: Sustainment is focused on keeping pace with the deployed force’s consumption (refueling, rearming, and resupplying the force).

Fact: Sustainment is more comprehensive and includes the maintenance and repair required to regenerate forces after their combat power has been degraded.¹⁰ Repairing degraded mission capabilities is an essential element of maritime sustainment. It is as much about keeping what you have in the fight as it is about getting back what you have lost.

Myth: Repair and maintenance are different things.

Fact: Sustainment is one of seven core joint functions.¹¹ Maintenance is one of seven logistics functions.¹² Repair, in turn, is one of seven maintenance functions.¹³ Doctrine thus identifies repair as part of a broader need for maintenance of the expeditionary force—but it is also a key element of sustainment. Maintenance and repair are performed largely by the same activities and resourced using the same dollars.

While ridding itself of old myths, the Navy needs to shift from a peacetime to a wartime mindset. As part of the pivot, it should reconsider the parameters by which it judges repair. Maintenance and repair activities currently seek predictability in cost and schedule. The ideal is to complete a maintenance availability on time, on-budget, and with all scheduled work completed. The Navy expects to get ships restored to in-service condition at the end of a maintenance period. A wartime mindset would focus instead on getting the greatest return on investment for repair and maintenance activities. In practice, this means returning required mission capabilities back to operating forces as soon as possible.

Force Priorities

Force generation is governed in peacetime by the Optimized Fleet Response Plan.¹⁴ To address force generation challenges for wartime, U.S. Fleet Forces Command is developing the Global Maritime Response Plan “to prepare the Fleet for Battle Stations—to ensure that the Navy is on a wartime footing capable of transitioning to ‘General Quarters,’” to generate combat forces, and to “provide Operational Commanders with the most capable and ready players on the field.”¹⁵

Under this framework, rather than focusing on fixing the ship that can be restored to full mission capability the fastest, repair activities should seek to restore needed mission capabilities as quickly as possible, whether they are on one ship or several. If a ship can be brought from not mission-capable to partially mission-capable faster than another ship can be brought from partial to full mission capability, the former might be a greater priority. Indeed, maximum force regeneration may come from the return to service of multiple ships that are only partially mission-capable.

The Navy also should reconsider its approach to the problems presented by the lack of repair capacity. Given the disparity between the service’s capacity to perform repairs and the amount of degraded mission capabilities that require repairs, the Navy should adopt a framework such as that proposed following Pacific Exercise 1989 by the Center for Naval Analyses. This was an exercise dedicated to battlefield damage assessment and repair and intended to address shortcomings in the Navy’s repair capabilities. The construct included four levels of repair: A-level repairs returned a ship to fully mission-capable, or FMC; B-level repairs restored the capability to perform at least one essential mission, making them partially mission-capable (PMC); C-level repairs restored the ability for a ship to transit to a rear-area ship-repair facility under its own power, even if it is not mission-capable (NMC); D-level repairs restored sufficient structural and watertight integrity to allow a ship to be towed or lifted to a rear-area facility.¹⁶

To maximize the aggregate mission capabilities available to the operational commander, those levels of repair should be organized in a tiered matrix to assist with triage, such as that shown in Table 1.

Under this construct, a ship placed in Tier II-B could be restored to FMC in a matter of days. A ship in Tier III-A could be restored to PMC in hours, if it were a question of replacing a known component not currently held on board. In the extreme case, a sunk vessel in Tier VI-C could be raised in weeks. By focusing on repairs that can be completed in shorter times, a commander could achieve a greater number of mission-capable ships, and therefore combat power, sooner.

This approach requires an understanding of which mission capabilities (antiair, ballistic-missile defense, antisubmarine warfare, helicopter operations, strike warfare) an operational commander most requires at a particular location and phase of an operation. It places significant importance on the triage of various repairs, which will guide the prioritization of efforts and the use of parts.

The difficulty of conducting triage and completing repairs highlights that the repair vector should factor prominently into the calculus of any commander who expects to continue fighting beyond the opening salvo. Restoring degraded mission capabilities requires specialized skills and tools. It takes a long time to determine the scope of work, including any troubleshooting, and to complete the work itself. Unlike refueling and resupplying, demand for which can be reasonably estimated, the demand for repair is less predictable—it is unknown which ships in which locations will require repairs to which systems. Repair will be the long pole in the tent when restoring ships to the fight through the combined efforts of all five maritime sustainment vectors. This means decisions concerning repair will drive other priority decisions related to force regeneration (such as which ships will receive limited fuel and ordnance, cannibalized parts, and sailors cross-decked from other ships).

Expeditionary Maintenance Capability

Besides changing how it thinks about repair, the Navy should change its approach to the doctrine, organization, and conduct of repair, and recapitalize its expeditionary repair capability. It must modify processes to use government civilians and contractors in expeditionary locations; work to further adjust the legislative framework on expeditionary maintenance and repair; and improve coordination among repair activities to synchronize their efforts.

To recapitalize expeditionary maintenance and repair, the Navy should follow the example of Marine Corps aviation intermediate-level (I-level) maintenance, which is conducted by Marine Aviation Logistics Squadrons (MALS). These squadrons operate out of containerized, deployable units. When a unit is stateside, so is the MALS. When the unit is deployed, the MALS deploys with it, operating the same equipment out of the same boxes as it did at Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, or Cherry Point, North Carolina.

The Navy version of this is the expeditionary maintenance and repair facility (EMRF). The concept is currently under development by Naval Sea Systems Command but would provide I-level repairs to ships or submarines out of a footprint of temporary structures—tensioned-fabric structures or containerized units—comparable to a MALS. A recent article highlighted the need for temporary expedient naval facilities.¹⁷ Those facilities should include the necessary maintenance and repair capabilities to rapidly regenerate ready forces.

An EMRF would not necessarily be able to provide major industrial repairs, being limited to facilities and equipment such as cranes and drydocks. It could, however, repair material failures in ship systems that would otherwise become mission-limiting.

Once the capability is established, repair activities throughout the Navy should transition in part from brick-and-mortar structures into these boxes, which could be deployed where and when needed.

Transitioning to a deployable I-level maintenance construct would require other changes as well. Government employees or contractors, not uniformed personnel, do most maintenance at the Navy’s shipyards and regional maintenance centers. Performing such work in expeditionary locations would require updating the position descriptions for government civilians, or the scope of work for contractors, to support the requirements for them to travel, including passports and immunizations. Although such measures could be waived in war, the Navy would need to deploy EMRFs to expeditionary locations ahead of time, and conditions at the onset of a maritime conflict may not reach the threshold to permit waivers. New measures should permit the deployment of such facilities in the ramp-up to conflict, before any thresholds are crossed or waivers granted.

Expanding the Navy’s expeditionary maintenance and repair capability beyond its two current submarine tenders will require recapitalizing platforms in addition to acquiring EMRFs. In the near term, the Navy should accelerate the procurement of Navajo-class T-ATSs and the future submarine tender (AS[X]) under development. The service also should dedicate assets currently in reduced operating status to the repair mission. Platforms such as expeditionary sea bases and expeditionary fast transports would be ideally suited to the repair mission. Finally, the Navy should immediately work to make the fullest use of new authorities granted in the Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 National Defense Authorization Act allowing a limited amount of maintenance in foreign ports beyond underway-limiting voyage repairs. 

In the longer term, expeditionary floating drydocks and purpose-built tenders and repair ships would be needed to regain capabilities comparable to those employed during World War II. In the near term, however, efforts to design and field purpose-built repair platforms would distract from more pressing needs, as they will not be delivered in an operationally relevant timeframe.

In Need of a Champion

Even more fundamental than a doctrinal shift to deployable I-level maintenance is the need for the Navy to improve its process for determining, validating, and funding expeditionary maintenance and repair requirements. Owing to the disconnect created during the OpNav reorganization—wherein N4 has a mandate for contested logistics, including repair, but no budget authority over it, while the high 9s have budget authority for repair matters but do not have a mandate to fund expeditionary repair issues—the repair vector is without a champion at the highest levels of the service, and without a voice to compete for scarce procurement and operations and maintenance dollars.

To establish an effective expeditionary maintenance and repair capability, the Navy should take the following actions as quickly as possible:

 • Identify a flag-level champion within OpNav for repair, and improve coordination between N4 and N9 related to defining and funding expeditionary maintenance and repair requirements.

 • Expedite the development and acquisition of EMRFs and increase their use in ship wartime repair and maintenance exercises.

 • Update the position description and contractor scope of work for all personnel who may be required to conduct maintenance and repair at forward sites.

 • Explore new authorities contained in Sec. 1026 of the FY 25 NDAA that allow expeditionary maintenance on non-forward-deployed ships.

The need for an expeditionary maintenance and repair capability is clear, given that ships will lose mission capabilities on their own, even absent enemy action. While many challenges and recommended solutions discussed relate to surface ships and submarines, the repair vector includes other platforms and communities, such as aviation, ground vehicles and equipment, airfields, ports, and infrastructure. It does not matter how many players the United States can put on the field if it cannot keep them there. The Navy must change its approach to the repair vector and make the necessary doctrinal and organizational changes to enable this capability. It must allocate the resources needed to achieve this goal if it is to prevail in future maritime conflicts.