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Can America deter China if its warships are stuck in port? Probably not. And the problem is made worse by chronic shipbuilding delays. This means the U.S. Navy is forced to rely more heavily on its legacy fleet, which requires more maintenance. And neither the Navy’s domestic shipyards nor its overseas facilities can meet current demand. Without immediate action, the Navy risks missing force design and operational readiness goals in critical regions like the Indo-Pacific.

Aware of the risk, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced plans to expand maintenance, repair, and overhaul activities in South Korean shipyards. From a purely economic point of view, South Korea has exactly what the United States lacks: the infrastructure, industrial capacity, and skilled labor to help sustain its navy’s ships. But more than that, partnering with South Korea makes good strategic sense, strengthening a key alliance that offers forward support for operations in the Western Pacific.

Taking full advantage of this partnership will mean overcoming several political and logistical barriers, but the operational benefits will be worth the effort.

Need for Foreign Partners Starts at Home

Although the Navy already utilizes several overseas facilities, including the regional maintenance centers in Japan, it still struggles to meet maintenance and repair schedules. Delays affect almost every major vessel class, leaving ships sitting longer in port — sometimes for years — or having to defer repairs due to expanding backlogs. While ships spend fewer hours at sea, costs continue to rise. Deferred repair costs hovered around $2 billion in recent years, almost enough to buy a new guided missile destroyer.

The high price of getting ships back on schedule has started affecting decommissioning schedules. A dozen Arleigh Burke-class destroyers saw their service lives extended in 2024. Those ships still in good condition are increasingly valuable as many of their peer vessels are deteriorating. While destroyers are seeing service life extensions, other ship classes, including amphibious warships, face early decommissioning due to resource-intensive repairs they need.

Delays and cost overruns stem from aging shipyards as well as shortages of critical parts and skilled labor. Many facilities need capital improvements, and efforts to modernize out-of-date infrastructure have progressed slowly. Parts shortages add to the bottleneck as supply chains, which the United States has tried to keep in house, remain too dependent on single-source suppliers. And difficulties recruiting and retaining workers persist amid perceptions of low wages and unattractive working conditions.

The numbers are not all bad. The Navy is now aiming for a 71 percent on-time completion rate, a significant improvement from past years. Perhaps just as importantly, there is plenty of political will to address the problem. The Trump administration has made shipbuilding a core priority, injecting U.S. money into the industry and securing investment from abroad. The recent deals with Japan and South Korea both promise hundreds of billions in commitments to revitalize U.S. shipbuilding, including Hanwha putting $5 billion into the Philly Shipyard. Those are commercial investments but likely have dual-use benefits.

But improving the maritime industrial base — and seeing results — will take time. Modernizing infrastructure, training workers, and structuring supply chains are all multi-year processes. Even the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, the Navy’s long-term plan for domestic modernization, is structured as a 20-year effort. Given the current geopolitical environment, the Navy must implement decisive interim measures to address the immediate readiness gap, making the integration of high-capacity allied shipyards a logistical necessity.

The Economic Case for South Korea

Allies and partners have untapped capacity that can help with U.S. Navy readiness, particularly in the Indo-Pacific where trade-dependent economies boast the maritime infrastructure and capacity to support ship repair. The U.S. government’s data on foreign ports show that over 100 sites across the Indo-Pacific have berths large enough fit an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. And many of those sites have the physical infrastructure the Department of Defense requires to support various types of ship sustainment, including pier-side cranes, electrical repair services, and warehousing.

By some measures, the United States has underutilized the capacity allies and partners have to offer, with most activity confined to the Navy’s regional maintenance operations in Sasebo and Yokosuka. Those sites help support the 7^th Fleet’s readiness through intermediate and depot level maintenance. Involvement with other countries has been more limited, but South Korean firms recently completed maintenance and repair operations on Military Sealift Command ships.

Taking fuller advantage of South Korea’s maritime infrastructure and know-how to repair surface combatants is the next logical step. South Korea has one of the world’s most efficient, advanced shipbuilding industries. Korean shipyards — including those operated by major conglomerates like Hanwha Ocean, Hyundai Heavy Industries, and Samsung Heavy Industries — possess large-scale, modern dry docks and expansive support facilities built for high-volume commercial production. These infrastructural assets and their associated management expertise can support Navy repair tasks. Labor shortages have been an issue in Korean industry, just like in the United States, but started rebounding in 2024. This industrial scale promises to absorb the backlog of U.S. surface combatants, especially destroyers and amphibious ships, freeing up strained domestic private yards to focus on more complex, U.S.-specific work.

Having the physical capacity to repair ships is just the first step. Securing Navy contracts also requires that foreign firms get the relevant certifications, such as master ship repair agreements and/or agreements for boat repair. These are formal application processes during which firms demonstrate the training and experience to perform a robust set of maintenance and repair tasks like sheet metal work, electrical repair, and more. Hanwha Ocean and Hyundai Heavy Industries already have these certifications, signaling their interest — and capacity — to do more work for the Navy.

Strategic Incentives

Apart from a globally competitive shipbuilding industry, South Korea has something else the US doesn’t — its location. The Navy’s primary strategic challenge in the coming decades is the tyranny of distance. Even if the U.S. industrial base could support all the Navy’s needs, it doesn’t get U.S. ships any closer to their areas of operation. And every day a ship spends transiting back to Pearl Harbor, Puget Sound, or San Diego is a day it is unavailable for deterrence or conflict.

Consider a destroyer based in Japan. If that ship enters a maintenance availability in San Diego or Hawaii, it is out of the fight for the repair time plus weeks of transit time across thousands of miles. If that same destroyer can receive its intermediate- or depot-level maintenance in a fully functional South Korean facility, the time saved in transit is instantly converted into operational time in the critical theaters of the Western Pacific and the South China Sea. This geographical advantage is not merely about convenience. It is about deterrence. Our ability to project power in the Indo-Pacific is directly proportional to the number of high-end combatants we can maintain on station.

Working with allies and partners is also a way to promote logistical resilience. In the same way the Trump administration wants strong critical supply chains, diversifying maintenance and repair operations means the Navy is less dependent on any given facility. Should domestic (or foreign) shipyards be attacked or otherwise disrupted — which is a real possibility in a major conflict — the Navy will have built-in redundancies across allied nations. This is especially important given that, while China has significantly expanded its ownership of foreign ports, the United States lags in comparison.

All of that is just about what the United States gets out of the deal. Working closer with South Korea generates mutual benefits by locking in security cooperation and fueling a crucial ally’s industry. Increased revenue helps South Korea maintain a robust, competitive industry that will assist both countries moving forward. And a stronger Korean industry is in both countries’ shared interests.

Challenges Remain

Utilizing foreign repair facilities is not cost-free. Relying on foreign partners introduces some security risks and logistical challenges. It also runs up against policy barriers that need to be addressed to take full advantage of a partnership with South Korea.

The first and perhaps largest challenge remains the protection of classified systems and sensitive technology present on Navy vessels. One reason the Navy doesn’t already do more overseas is the government’s strong preference for keeping parts and labor within the United States, which supports domestic industry while avoiding the complications of sharing sensitive technologies. We’ve already seen classification issues and other security barriers arise under the Australia – United Kingdom – United States agreement. Even seemingly menial tasks on highly advanced ships like destroyers could require access to sensitive systems or areas of the vessel. As a result, the Navy must determine how much to restrict access to U.S. vessels.

One possible solution is limiting Korean workers to non-sensitive tasks focused on hull, mechanical, and electrical work. But this approach would leave some of South Korea’s capacity on the table. Instead, as it has done under AUKUS, the United States may wish to loosen the restraints on sharing technology as well as utilizing foreign labor. The groundwork is already laid: South Korea builds and operates vessels with highly restricted technologies like the Aegis Combat System, the guided missile system that supports missions like ballistic missile defense and strike capabilities. The United States has shared this technology with relatively few countries, but Korea and Japan both utilize Aegis in their current fleet. From that point of view, taking further steps to enable maintenance and repair are not out of step with existing security cooperation efforts.

Second, the U.S. maritime industrial base already suffers from parts and supplies shortages. It is not optimized for material delivery to a forward maintenance hub in Korea. America’s preference for using its own materials and components exacerbates the logistical issues of getting a part from an assembly line in the continental United States to a shipyard in South Korea.

Overcoming this problem means increasing America’s willingness to source parts in South Korea, which makes the most logistical sense and takes fullest advantage of the world’s second largest shipbuilding industry. That may mean co-producing parts with U.S. firms who license designs, or it may mean the Navy starts stockpiling parts near the chosen Korean facilities for future needs. If the point of working with South Korea is to have repair capacity in a Western Pacific contingency, then stockpiling should happen now, especially for long lead-time U.S.-manufactured components. The alternative is streamlining the procurement path and ensuring parts are available locally, rather than relying on delayed shipment from the United States.

Third, and not least, there may be some concern in the United States that the deal with South Korea sounds a bit too much like outsourcing, especially at a time when the last two White Houses have been so focused on onshoring critical manufacturing. But working with allies and partners is not zero-sum, and current backlogs indicate there is plenty of work to go around.

To bring U.S. industry on board, the Navy must clearly articulate that this arrangement is an effort to triage the current backlog — and invest in future security — rather than a fundamental shift away from American vendors. Those investments in the U.S. industrial base, some of which are being made by South Korea, are still critical to modernizing infrastructure and building productivity capacity in the United States. If strictly necessary, repair contracts for Korean firms can include sunset clauses tied to appreciable increases in U.S. capacity.

Moving Forward

The decision to utilize South Korean shipyards for U.S. Navy surface combatant maintenance is a pragmatic response to a growing operational challenge. It means coming to terms with some market realities. The United States doesn’t have the industrial base it needs to support the Navy’s readiness goals. Foreign partnerships provide the necessary time and stability for the U.S. government and industry to execute the long-term, multi-decade modernization of its own industrial infrastructure. But even if the United States did have enough capacity to keep things in house, it would still be a bad idea. Cooperation with allies, including countries with advanced capabilities in critical industries, is still a strategic imperative. By leveraging allied expertise, the Navy immediately gains increased fleet availability — and enhanced forward deterrence in the critical Indo-Pacific theater.

Jeff Kucik is a research scientist at CNA and a fellow at New York University’s Wahba Initiative for Strategic Competition.

**Please note, as a matter of house style War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.

Image: Grady Fontana via DVIDS