U.S. Navy Outperforms in Mideast, But a Pacific War Would Test Endurance
[By Captains Al Collins and Kevin Eyer]
Recent naval operations in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz have demonstrated that the United States Navy remains extraordinarily capable in combat. Precision strike operations, integrated air and missile defense, continuous maritime presence, and sophisticated joint operations have reinforced the credibility of American naval power. By nearly any operational measure, the force has performed at a very high level under demanding conditions.
That success should not be mistaken for proof of how the Navy would perform in prolonged conflict against a peer adversary. The true benchmark in high-end warfare against a peer is whether naval power can be sustained over the course of a prolonged Pacific conflict. Therefore, it is important to establish a framework for examining the details that will determine success in protracted conflict. The framework suggests that success hinges on distributed forward-based logistics, renewed emphasis on neglected warfare competencies, and sufficient operational depth in munitions, ships, and manpower.
The China Challenge
Combat operations against regional opponents, such as the Houthis or Iran, demonstrate current operational proficiency under narrow conditions. They do not answer the more difficult question of whether the Navy could sustain that performance against China in a conflict defined by distance, attrition, and the degradation or destruction of the systems that support combat power.
The distinction matters because a hypothetical Pacific war tests far more than tactical effectiveness. It would likely be protracted and fought across an immense theater while adversary attacks target deployed forces and the networks and infrastructure that sustain them. The opening phase might last days or weeks, but the decisive question is whether combat power could be sustained across months or even years.
The United States continues to maintain a policy of strategic ambiguity regarding Taiwan. Washington deliberately avoids stating explicitly whether it would intervene militarily in the event of Chinese action against the island nation. The policy is intended to deter both Beijing and Taipei from destabilizing behavior while preserving flexibility for American decision-makers.
Regardless of whether the U.S. would or would not intervene to defend Taiwan, China is now the central organizing challenge for U.S. defense planning. The Department of Defense identifies China as the pacing challenge shaping force design, modernization priorities, and operational concepts. The Pacific has become the primary theater for long-term strategic competition.
China’s military modernization has proceeded at extraordinary speed. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is now numerically the largest navy in the world, with rapid expansion in destroyers, frigates, submarines, amphibious vessels, and carrier aviation. It is supported by a mature missile strike complex, advanced integrated air defenses, cyber warfare capabilities, and increasingly sophisticated space and counter-space systems.
Critically, China’s proximity to Taiwan provides a structural advantage. Its military objectives are comparatively close, allowing military forces to concentrate near home waters. China’s military is supported by dense land-based logistics, missile coverage, and industrial depth. By contrast, to fight China near Taiwan, the United States must project and sustain combat power across thousands of miles of ocean, and maintain it under contested conditions far from the factories and shipyards that produced it. This asymmetry is not decisive, but it shapes a fundamental problem: keeping combat power viable across vast distances, under fire, for as long as the conflict demands.
From Performance to Endurance
Ultimately, what matters is endurance. Endurance is not simply the ability to absorb losses. It is the capacity to sustain combat effectiveness over time despite attrition, disruption, and operational fatigue. In a Pacific war, endurance would determine whether initial success could be translated into a strategic and enduring advantage. For example, during World War II, the U.S. Army deployed floating maintenance and repair depots to keep regeneration high and its air force in the fight. Without these ships, damaged aircraft would have to return to distant shore-based facilities for repairs.
U.S.S. Maj Gen Herbert A Dargue anchored off Saipan or Iwo Jima. She was one of the six Liberty ships converted into floating repair depots as part of Operation Ivory Soap. (Wikimedia Commons)
A force designed for a war defined by distance and attrition must be capable of delivering combat power at the outset of conflict and remaining operational over extended periods. This means possessing the ability to repair itself, keep crews combat-ready, replace losses, and regenerate capability under fire. That requires more than tactical proficiency.
Ships must continue operating despite logistical disruption. Supply networks must remain viable under attack, maintenance and repair must occur forward and under degraded conditions, and combat losses must be absorbed without interrupting operations. In other words, self-sufficiency despite attrition is a core requirement.
Recent operations demonstrated tactical and operational excellence, but they occurred under conditions that differ fundamentally from those expected in a Pacific war. Logistics networks were intact. Regional infrastructure remained accessible. Operational timelines were limited. Even intense engagements remained episodic rather than continuous. Those conditions bear no resemblance to the geography, distance, and unrelenting operational pressure a Pacific war imposes.
Observable indicators suggest that continuous operational demand produces cumulative effects that the force absorbs quietly. Maintenance schedules compress. Technical personnel are stretched across multiple demands. High-end platforms require increasingly careful management to maintain availability rates. Readiness is preserved, but often at the cost of operational depth and reach.
The Navy adapts well and has always done so. Personnel surge forward to fill gaps, maintenance is reprioritized, and operational demands are met through extraordinary effort. In the short-term, this system works. Over time, however, the gap between consumption and regeneration widens. The system thins and becomes less resilient, even as it remains highly capable. That is the central risk: not systemic collapse, but steady erosion.
Read the Signs
Recent operations already provide warning signals, revealing stresses that a prolonged Pacific conflict would expose on a much larger scale. The employment of carrier strike groups under unrelenting global tasking illustrates the pressure placed on a limited number of high-value assets. Modern carriers are not simply ships, but complex floating airbases requiring continuous maintenance, logistics support, and a pipeline of trained personnel. Back-to-back surge deployment cycles reduce recovery time not only for platforms but for entire air wings and support ecosystems. As operational demand increases, maintenance windows compress, and manning shortfalls compound. Parts pipelines tighten, and personnel rotations accelerate.
A more visible strain is occurring in the consumption of precision munitions. Recent operations in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz demonstrate that even limited engagements can generate significant expenditure rates for advanced interceptors and strike weapons, including SM-series interceptors, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and other high-end systems whose production lines were streamlined for peacetime and not wartime consumption. A Pacific war would magnify this dynamic exponentially.
A third warning signal is less visible but equally consequential. Several foundational warfighting competencies required for conflict with China have atrophied during decades of focus on power projection ashore and limited regional contingencies. For example, anti-submarine warfare would be a daily operational requirement in a Pacific campaign, not a niche specialty. Mine countermeasures would determine whether ports and sea lanes remained usable. Taiwan’s limited number of deep-water ports presents an especially acute vulnerability to offensive mining. Both competencies have received less consistent emphasis than a peer conflict would require. Success in limited regional operations can create a false sense of confidence in preparedness for a sustained great-power war.
Unlike regional operations, a peer conflict in the Pacific would generate simultaneous demand across every warfare domain, consuming munitions and capabilities at a pace far beyond recent experience. Modern precision warfare creates a paradox: accuracy increases consumption. Each target may require fewer shots, but the number of targets and the complexity of the environment drive overall expenditure upward. The limiting factor is industrial throughput.
Move the Force Forward
In the Pacific, geography is the dominant operational variable. The transit from the U.S. West Coast to the Western Pacific requires roughly 15-18 days under peacetime conditions and significantly longer under contested ones. Distance compounds every element of operational warfare, including fuel consumption, maintenance delays, resupply cycles, and casualty evacuation timelines. In a contested environment, time becomes both a tactical and strategic constraint and demands a fundamentally different basing architecture.
The United States currently relies heavily on a limited number of forward hubs, principally Japan and Guam. These remain essential, but they are not sufficient for a war fought on a Pacific scale. They present concentration risk, logistical bottlenecks, and targeting vulnerabilities in an era of massed long-range precision strikes.
A more resilient posture requires sacrificing efficiency for a distributed basing network across the Indo-Pacific that expands access, disperses critical resources, and enables logistics and repair functions to continue under sustained attack. This is not merely a military requirement. It is also a strategic opportunity.
Many Indo-Pacific states increasingly recognize that their security and economic futures are tied to the regional balance of power. Infrastructure investments associated with defense cooperation can strengthen deterrence while also improving national resilience. Facilities that support military operations often provide broader economic and civil benefits, creating incentives for deeper regional partnerships.
Distributed basing also complicates adversary targeting. Concentrated infrastructure can be neutralized or degraded under missile attack. Distributed networks are inherently more resilient, even if individually more modest. In a theater defined by distance and denied access, where you start when the war begins largely determines whether you can fight at all.
The United States will not fight alone. A sustained Pacific campaign would require not merely allied political support, but interoperable logistics, distributed basing access, industrial coordination, and intelligence integration. Those alliances are a source of endurance. Access, logistics support, industrial cooperation, and intelligence integration provided by partners throughout the Indo-Pacific are essential to sustaining combat power over time.
Build the Fleet That Keeps the Fight Alive
The deeper issue is structural. The Navy must ensure it has not only the power to strike, but the architecture to remain in the fight after the opening phase. Combat power at sea depends on afloat logistics. A Pacific war would place enormous demands on replenishment oilers, ammunition ships, sealift vessels, repair ships, hospital ships, and auxiliary platforms. Yet many of these capabilities remain limited in number, aging in composition, and dependent on civilian mariners and the Military Sealift Command.
This dependency introduces strategic uncertainty regarding manpower availability, survivability, and forward repair capacity under contested conditions. The future frigate program illustrates a broader challenge in force development: balancing industrial considerations with operational requirements. As currently conceived, the platform appears optimized for presence missions and sustaining shipbuilding capacity rather than high-end escort warfare. It lacks the systems and capacity necessary for robust area air defense of logistics formations, and its anti-submarine warfare capabilities remain uncertain following the cancellation of earlier mission module efforts.
Revitalizing the shipbuilding industrial base is both necessary and strategically prudent. The larger question is whether the resulting frigate platform provides the capabilities required to operate as an effective escort in a contested combat environment. If endurance depends on sustaining logistics under fire, escort forces must be designed foremost around that mission.
Meanwhile, the Navy will almost certainly commit its principal surface combatants, the Arleigh-Burke class destroyers, to offensive and defensive operations in the opening phases of a Pacific conflict. This limits their availability to escort logistics formations, raising a fundamental question the force has not yet fully answered. Does it possess sufficient protection capacity to keep the supply chain intact through months of contested operations?
Experts often suggest unmanned surface vessels as part of the solution. They may indeed become important force multipliers in sensing, targeting, and distributed operations. But their survivability, command-and-control requirements, and integration into contested maritime environments remain unresolved. Their contribution to keeping the force in the fight remains uncertain.
Readiness and Regeneration
The Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP) was designed to stabilize deployment cycles and restore predictability in readiness after years of high operational tempo. It has improved maintenance discipline and force generation processes. But a key question remains unresolved. Does it regenerate forces capable of meeting the demands a great-power war would impose?
Much of the current readiness assessment remains tied to certification cycles and deployment schedules. These metrics are designed for peacetime force management rather than wartime survival. Harder questions remain. Can ships operate while isolated from shore infrastructure? Can crews maintain complex systems without contractor support? Can battle damage be repaired rapidly under contested conditions? Can logistics networks survive persistent attack? Most importantly, can the forces regenerate combat capability as fast as they consume it? That is the defining question of readiness in a great-power war, and the current status of the force suggests that the answer is “no.”
A more useful assessment framework would measure not certifications achieved, but organic capability preserved. Can crews diagnose and repair complex systems without contractor support, whether ships can remain on station without shore infrastructure, and whether battle damage can be addressed forward rather than returning to port. These are the conditions a Pacific conflict would impose from the first day. Readiness is rarely measured against these conditions in today’s framework.
The Industrial Base and Ordnance
The rapid consumption of precision weapons defines modern warfare. Recent conflicts demonstrated that even limited engagements can place significant stress on advanced munitions inventories. A Pacific war would simultaneously multiply this demand across all domains.
Yet the U.S. defense industrial base remains structured for efficiency rather than surge production. Many systems rely on consolidated supply chains, specialized labor, and long production timelines. Scaling output rapidly under wartime conditions would be difficult without significant preexisting expansion.
The core challenge is therefore not stockpiles alone, but whether the nation’s production infrastructure can scale under wartime conditions. Can the force replenish what it expends before culmination and operational momentum falters? Defense manufacturing capacity, skilled labor, supply chain resilience, and access to critical materials determine how long the nation can fight.
Conclusion
The Navy demonstrated extraordinary capability in recent operations. But those operations were fought close to intact logistics networks, against adversaries who could not threaten American industrial depth, and across timelines measured in weeks rather than years. A peer conflict in the Pacific presents none of those conditions. It would test the force against geography, vast distances, contested sea lanes, and China’s asymmetric industrial capacity.
A force can deliver brilliantly at the outset while exhausting the resources required to keep fighting. Tactical brilliance can create the illusion of long-term sustainability even when the ability to sustain large-scale fighting remains largely untested. That illusion is dangerous. By the time it is dispelled, the window for correction may already have closed.
The United States faces a requirement not only to preserve naval superiority but to strengthen the foundations that allow maritime power to endure. Logistics, basing, fleet architecture, readiness, and industrial capacity are often discussed as separate issues. In a Pacific war, they are inseparable. Each contributes to the same outcome: that combat power can be sustained long enough to achieve strategic objectives. Any strategic assessment of a naval conflict with China must acknowledge a fundamental rule. While performance wins engagements, endurance wins wars.
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Captain Al Collins is a retired Surface Warfare Officer who served on active duty for 39 years. He commanded a guided-missile destroyer, Destroyer Squadron One, and served as Chief of Staff for U.S. Fourth Fleet.
Captain Kevin Eyer is a retired Surface Warfare Officer who served on active duty for 27 years. He deployed aboard seven guided-missile cruisers, serving in command positions aboard three of them.
The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.
