A leading South Korean shipyard has won a repair contract for a US Navy auxiliary supply ship as the sea service looks to allies for assistance in maintaining the fleet.
South Korea is a prominent allied shipbuilding power in the Pacific, and the US has been exploring closer cooperation that could provide answers as the Navy takes a hard look at the American yards constructing and doing maintenance on its ships.
On Wednesday, HD Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. announced that it had secured a maintenance, repair, and overhaul contract for the US Navy Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Alan Shepard. The overhaul will begin in September near HD Hyundai’s headquarters in Ulsan on the southeastern coast.
The planned repair work will include propeller cleaning, tank maintenance, and inspections of onboard equipment. Alan Shepard is expected to be delivered to the Navy in November. The Navy didn’t immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on the upcoming work.
The contracted work is “highly significant,” Joon Won-ho, head of HD Hyundai Heavy Industries’ Naval and Special Ship Business Unit said, per the company’s statement, because it marks the first contract following the South Korean government’s proposal for a joint shipbuilding initiative with the US — MAGSA, or Make American Shipbuilding Great Again.
South Korean officials proposed this MASGA initiative late last month as Washington and Seoul negotiated and navigated tariffs. The $150 billion partnership will be led by South Korean shipbuilders and help strengthen the US shipbuilding industry, including constructing new yards, supporting worker training, and assisting with ship maintenance.
President Donald Trump and some other US officials have said that building more Navy ships and fixing broader shipbuilding and maintenance problems are top priorities, although questions remain on how the administration plans to pursue that.
Before the MASGA initiative, HD Hyundai was already working closely with American shipbuilders, including a strategic partnership agreement with Huntington Ingalls Industries, among other collaborations in the US commercial sector.
Other South Korean shipbuilders have also been helping with Navy repair and maintenance. In March, Hanwha Ocean finished up a regular overhaul on the USNS Wally Schirra, another Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship. The repair work marked the first time that a South Korean yard had bid on and won a regular overhaul contract of that scale for that type of vessel.
In the MASGA proposal, South Korea’s top shipbuilders — HD Hyundai, Hanwha Ocean, and Samsung Heavy Industries — agreed to cooperate on exploring how to bolster America’s industry.
While US allies and partners have been involved in helping maintain the Navy’s fleet before, there has been a ramp-up in cooperation. US experts and officials have noted that Indo-Pacific allies, namely South Korea and Japan, have robust shipbuilding industries that may have answers to Navy problems.
Some potential solutions observed in allied shipyards include better in-house worker training and more effective and efficient ship designs that reduce the labor hours needed to construct, maintain, and modernize vessels. Some models from outside the defense sector may also be applicable to military shipbuilding.
Navy leaders have acknowledged that the service can learn from the shipbuilding capabilities of its allies and partners. In April 2024, then-Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro visited a South Korean shipyard and said he was “floored at the level of digitization and real-time monitoring of shipbuilding progress, with readily available information down to individual pieces of stock material.”
During that trip, Del Toro encouraged South Korean companies to invest in commercial and naval shipbuilding facilities in the US, as many were “largely intact and dormant” and “ripe for redevelopment.”
The current Navy secretary, John Phelan, visited both Hanwha Ocean Shipbuilding and HD Hyundai Heavy Industries in April and emphasized the value of South Korean yards in helping the US Navy maintain readiness in the Indo-Pacific, a priority theater where competition with China, a shipbuilding juggernaut with a substantial fleet, is a key focus for the Department of Defense.
“Leveraging the expertise of these highly capable shipyards enables timely maintenance and repairs for our vessels to operate at peak performance,” Phelan said. “This level of large-scale repair and maintenance capability strengthens our combat readiness, sustains forward deployed operational presence, and reinforces regional stability.”
In addition to the Wally Schirra, a South Korean yard has also worked on USNS Yukon, which is a Henry J. Kaiser-class underway replenishment oiler.
These discussions come as the Navy struggles to address long-standing issues in how it builds and maintains its fleet.
There are backlogs in maintenance, and major shipbuilding programs have faced significant delays and overrun costs due to a range of factors, such as workforce issues, limited shipyard capacity, supply chain disruptions, and logistics and timeline problems.
The problems have raised concerns in Washington about fleet size and readiness as the US focuses on deterring and preparing to fight a potential conflict with an adversary like China. The Navy has said that South Korean shipbuilding is an asset to the US as China’s shipbuilding industry dominates the global market and pumps out military vessels at an alarming rate.
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