The U.S. Department of Defense will launch military repair hubs in the Indo-Pacific countries of Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and the Philippines, sources told Nikkei Asia, as it envisions a global network of repair hubs for key warfighting platforms.
The Pentagon’s new Regional Sustainment Framework (RSF) envisions utilizing existing industrial capabilities of its allies and partners so that it can conduct maintenance, repairs and overhauls of its ships, planes and vehicles closer to their area of operation instead of bringing them back to the continental U.S.
The plan is to launch pilot programs in five Indo-Pacific countries this year, then expand it to NATO partners in the European Command’s area in 2025 and to Latin American partners under the Southern Command in 2026.
Of the five countries, four are treaty allies. Singapore, though not an ally, has had a long tradition of hosting U.S. warships on a rotational basis.
The Pentagon is expected to announce more details this month, according to one of the sources familiar with the matter.
A Pentagon spokesperson told Nikkei Asia that it does not have anything to announce at this time. “We do not want to get ahead of negotiations that are still underway,” the official said.
The program stems from an understanding that the U.S. alone cannot compete with China’s industrial prowess. In July 2023, the defense news website The War Zone published a U.S. Navy briefing slide that showed China, the world’s largest shipbuilding nation, having about 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the U.S.
A U.S. Air Force member based at Misawa Air Base in Japan’s Aomori prefecture conducts a post-flight inspection on an F-16C Fighting Falcon during an exercise at Sam Ratulangi International Airport in Indonesia. (U.S. Air Force)
The department has been signaling progress on the RSF since early this year. The Pentagon’s point man for the project, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment Christopher Lowman, said at the U.S. Naval Institute-sponsored West 2024 conference in February that military logistics was shifting from the traditional “reactive” stance to a “proactive” stance that offers solutions before the point of failure.
“In today’s strategic context, where near-peer competitors are increasingly capable of contesting our operational reach,” methods of repairing key warfighting platforms “need to evolve as the national security environment evolves around us,” Lowman said.
He said that having repair hubs in various locations adds to deterrence. By distributing maintenance, repair and overhaul capabilities across the region and integrating them with those of allies and partners, the U.S. adds layers of complexity to any adversary’s planning process, Lowman said.
In March, Lowman led a delegation of senior logisticians to Australia, Japan and the Philippines to discuss the matter.
When the Pentagon announced the RSF concept in May, it said industrial-base integration with allies and partners would contribute to “predictable demand” and help defense contractors make the decision to invest in capabilities.
Lowman told a July media roundtable that the repairs will address not only “wear and tear,” but also “battle-damaged equipment” in conflict.
Offering the theater commander multiple options for the repair of unserviceable platforms “creates a higher level of uncertainty within adversaries’ planning cycle and thereby enhancing deterrence and the deterrence value,” he said.
Asian allies, for their part, are actively preparing for the business opportunity. South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean announced in August a U.S. Navy contract to perform maintenance on a roughly 40,000-tonne American logistics support vessel at its Geoje shipyard on the southern end of the Korean Peninsula.
This came only weeks after the company announced that it had signed a Master Ship Repair Agreement with the U.S. Navy to allow such missions.
Hanwha had announced in June a deal to acquire Philly Shipyard in Pennsylvania, part of the former Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, for $100 million.
Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel has been spearheading efforts to utilize private Japanese shipyards to repair American warships forward-deployed to Japan.
“Repairing and maintaining ships in theater can be as effective of a deterrence as training is,” he told Nikkei Asia.
