How long will it take during a major naval war before most of America's ships are in port facing a repair bottleneck that can't be overcome?
Can the Navy repair battle damage in a long war with China? No:
In every case since 2000 of emergent repairs to the Navy’s warships, the paucity of shipyard capacity and expeditionary battle-damage repair capacity has been obvious. The decision to decommission the Bonhomme Richard was the direct result of insufficient capacity. Experts estimate the Connecticut will be out of service for years, and these are unacceptable outcomes.
Its telling the Navy decided to decommission, rather than repair, the fire-ravaged Bonhomme Richard to costs and the expected impact on limited repair facilities. This raised serious doubts about the Navy’s ability to sustain the fleet in war.
And our repair capacity could get much worse at the outset of a war if the Chinese manage to carry out a global Pearl Harbor using conventional hypersonic weapons.
Unless allied ports can repair our ships, our fleet could erode quickly from relatively minor battle damage, mishaps, or mechanical issues.
And I warned about the issue of a ship being as good as sunk after the Bonhamme Richard incident--and earlier in regard to carriers, when I wrote that "carrier defenders who claim super carriers are difficult or perhaps impossible to sink miss the point" about whether they can contribute to a war because being too damaged to fight for years is good enough.
The Navy might need to shift to modularized auxiliary cruisers to cope in such a war.
And work out the kinks of having carrier air wings flying from land bases.
Our ships and crews may be better than the Chinese. But the Chinese can replace ship losses much more easily than we can. I hope our allies are in better shape.
And that we strike their shipyards down to our level of capacity.
