The missile attack is over.
An Arleigh Burke-class destroyer is still afloat somewhere in the western Pacific.
That is the good news.
The bad news is that one of its SPY radar arrays has been shredded. Part of its superstructure is burning. Its helicopter hangar has been hit. Several sailors are dead or wounded. The ship can make only a few knots, if it can move at all.
Some of the missiles inside its vertical launch system may still be usable. The shock of the attack may have damaged others.
The crew has done what Navy crews are trained to do. Fires are being fought. Flooding is being controlled. The wounded are being treated. Damage-control teams are trying to keep the ship alive.
But now comes a question the United States Navy has not had to answer on a large scale since World War II:
What do you do with the ship?
That question is at the heart of a new RAND study examining battle-damage repair of the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
And the answer is considerably more troubling than simply sending the ship to a shipyard.
RAND gathered U.S. and allied defense experts for a two-day tabletop exercise in August 2025 and put them through four increasingly difficult scenarios involving damaged American warships during a confrontation and eventual war with China.
The researchers concluded that repairing ships during a major Indo-Pacific war would be “significantly more complex than existing plans allow.”
That’s bureaucratic language for a very practical wartime problem.
The Navy may be able to fight the battle.
It isn’t nearly as certain how quickly it can repair the ships that survive it.
A Navy Built Around the Burke
This matters because the Arleigh Burke is not some secondary ship in the American fleet.
It is the backbone of the Navy’s surface combatant force.
RAND counted 73 Burkes in commission when the study was conducted, with the Navy planning to purchase another 51 Flight III destroyers over the next 30 years.
They protect aircraft carriers. They hunt submarines. They launch Tomahawk cruise missiles. Their Aegis combat systems and SPY radars provide air and missile defense.
And in a war with China, they would be operating in precisely the places where China would be trying to destroy them.
RAND’s tabletop exercise assumed that some would inevitably be hit.
That is where the exercise gets interesting.
Instead of asking whether a destroyer could defeat an incoming missile, RAND asked what happens after the missile gets through.
Imagine the Problem
Consider a destroyer damaged in the South China Sea.
The ship survives, but its radar has been knocked out and its propulsion plant has been damaged.
The captain and crew first have to save the ship.
Then somebody farther up the chain must determine whether the destroyer is worth repairing in theater.
Can it still fight?
Can temporary repairs restore enough capability to return it to combat?
Should it instead receive only enough work to make the long voyage home?
Does it have to be towed?
Where does it go?
And who makes that decision?
Those questions become considerably harder once the shooting starts.
A shipyard that would be perfectly reasonable during peacetime may be inside China’s missile-engagement zone during a war.
The nearest suitable port may have been attacked.
The country owning another available shipyard may allow an American destroyer to enter—but may not permit American missiles to be unloaded there.
Commercial dry docks may already be occupied.
The host government may decide that repairing a badly damaged American warship would make its own port a Chinese target.
And even if everyone agrees to repair the ship, the Navy may discover that the part it needs isn’t available.
RAND found problems in virtually every step of that chain.
The Ports May Be Targets Too
The fourth scenario in the RAND exercise is perhaps the most revealing.
The imagined war over Taiwan has entered its second month.
American and Chinese forces have both suffered heavy losses. Missile inventories and spare parts are being depleted. American shipyards on the West Coast are approaching capacity.
Meanwhile, ports in the Marianas, Japan and Singapore have suffered heavy Chinese attacks.
Even American ships in Korean ports have been targeted.
Then another U.S. surface group is ambushed in the South China Sea.
A littoral combat ship is lost.
USS Shoup, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, is badly damaged. Its helicopter hangar is destroyed, propulsion is gone, flooding has occurred amidships, part of its SPY radar is damaged and its vertical launch system has been destroyed.
USS O’Kane, another Burke, has also been hit. Its 5-inch gun and an adjacent vertical launch system are destroyed. Shrapnel has torn through a forward SPY radar array, and the bridge has been badly damaged.
The closest friendly ships are nearly 500 nautical miles away.
Now somebody has to rescue survivors, protect the damaged ships, assess the damage, possibly tow them, find someplace to put them and determine whether either destroyer can be returned to combat.
And all of this is happening while the war continues.
That is a very different proposition from repairing a ship after an accident in peacetime.
Where Do You Send It?
The Pacific has excellent shipyards.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the Navy can use them.
RAND’s exercise included representatives from Japan, South Korea and Australia, and their participation exposed one of the study’s more important findings: American planners did not always know what allied facilities could actually do—or what allied governments would permit them to do.
Japan has some of the best repair capabilities in the region.
But a damaged destroyer first has to reach Japan, and Yokosuka itself could be threatened.
South Korean participants expressed substantial willingness to help, including repairs, towing and humanitarian support.
Australia is a strong ally, but geography gets in the way. Darwin is relatively close to the likely fighting area but has limited capability for major repairs. Getting a ship to more capable facilities around Adelaide or Sydney means taking it much farther from the fight.
The Philippines is strategically located but has more limited repair capability.
And Singapore presents an entirely different problem.
Its shipyards are excellent, but many are commercial facilities. A commercial operator may already have customers occupying its dry docks. More importantly, Singapore might be willing to help during a limited confrontation but become far more cautious during a full-scale U.S.-China war.
That distinction matters.
A port that exists on a planner’s map is not necessarily a port available to the United States when missiles are flying.
Then There Are the Parts
Suppose the Navy finds a shipyard.
Suppose the host country agrees.
Suppose the damaged destroyer reaches it.
The repair can still stop because somebody asks a painfully simple question:
Do we have the part?
RAND found a serious problem here.
The Navy no longer maintains a budget line for war-reserve materiel of this type. The normal supply system responds largely to peacetime demand.
But battle damage creates demand for things that rarely break during peacetime.
A radar component that rarely needs replacement under normal conditions suddenly becomes critically important when several destroyers have been hit.
Older ships create another problem.
Some Burkes have systems built around components that were commercially common decades ago but are no longer manufactured.
And even ships of the same class aren’t necessarily identical.
One participant summed up the Aegis problem perfectly:
“Every Aegis is like a snowflake. No two are the same.”
That means taking a component from one damaged destroyer and installing it aboard another may not work.
Cannibalization—the old wartime practice of sacrificing one damaged machine to keep another fighting—becomes much harder.
The Missing Shipyard Workers
There is another commodity that cannot simply be flown across the Pacific in a shipping container.
Experience.
RAND participants warned that the American maintenance and repair workforce that once existed has declined.
Experienced repair technicians are in short supply.
Specialists capable of repairing SPY radars are particularly scarce.
That becomes a serious wartime problem because a shipyard, spare parts and tools are useless without people who know how to put the ship back together.
The Navy has developed Expeditionary Mobile Repair Facilities that can deploy to relatively undeveloped locations and perform significant repairs short of dry docking.
RAND’s exercise even assumed ten of these facilities were available.
Yet participants repeatedly gravitated toward conventional overseas shipyards instead.
That suggests another problem: The Navy may possess capabilities that its own operational planners do not fully understand or routinely incorporate into wartime planning.
The Clock Is Running
Now return to our damaged destroyer.
It is still sitting somewhere in the Pacific.
Perhaps it can make five knots.
Perhaps it has to be towed.
Perhaps its missiles need to be removed before entering an Australian port.
Perhaps the technicians it needs are in the United States.
Perhaps its replacement SPY components are somewhere else.
Perhaps the host nation hasn’t authorized the work.
Meanwhile, China gets a vote.
The damaged ship may still be within missile range. The tug sent to retrieve it may need protection. The port selected for repairs may itself become a target.
And every destroyer assigned to escort a crippled ship is a destroyer that isn’t somewhere else fighting.
That is the part of battle-damage repair that doesn’t show up on a shipyard schedule.
A damaged destroyer can begin consuming other combat power.
Winning the Battle Twice
Naval warfare has always had two sides.
The first is destroying the enemy.
The second is keeping your own fleet fighting.
During World War II, the United States possessed an enormous industrial base, forward repair facilities, floating dry docks, repair ships, tenders and armies of skilled shipyard workers.
Damaged ships were patched, cannibalized, towed, rebuilt and returned to combat.
Today’s Navy is vastly more technologically sophisticated.
Its repair system is also leaner, more specialized and dependent upon long supply chains.
RAND’s tabletop exercise suggests that the Navy has optimized much of that system for efficiency during peacetime.
War rewards something different.
Redundancy.
Extra parts.
Extra people.
Extra repair capacity.
And the ability to lose the port you planned to use and still keep fighting.
RAND recommends rebuilding stocks of critical components, expanding deployable repair capabilities, developing a larger skilled workforce, establishing clearer wartime command relationships and reaching detailed agreements with allies before a crisis begins.
Most importantly, it recommends practicing what happens when the obvious repair facilities aren’t available.
Because in a war with China, the Navy cannot assume Yokosuka, Singapore, Guam or another familiar port will simply be waiting for the damaged ships to arrive.
The missiles aimed at the fleet will also be aimed at the infrastructure that keeps that fleet fighting.
The lesson from RAND’s exercise is therefore much larger than ship repair.
A Navy’s strength isn’t measured only by how many ships it can send into battle.
It is also measured by how many damaged ships it can put back into the fight.
And right now, RAND is warning that the United States has some work to do.