The Secretary of the Navy continued a tour of East Asian allies last week with a stop in Japan, in part looking to spur more investment in domestic U.S. shipyard capabilities.
Secretary Carlos Del Toro met with Kensuke Namura, president of Namura Shipbuilding
and subsidiary Sasebo Heavy Industries; Masayuki Eguchi, senior vice president of integrated defense and space systems at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Atushi Etoh, managing officer of Japan Marine United on Feb. 28.
The following day, Del Toro and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel toured Mitsubishi’s shipyard in Yokohama. The Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oiler USNS Big Horn (T-AO 198) is currently undergoing repairs at Mitsubishi.
“I am here to reaffirm the Department of the Navy’s long-standing partnership with the defense forces of Japan, and to strengthen that partnership even further,” Del Toro said in a statement while in Japan.
The discussions with Japanese shipbuilding executives are part of Del Toro’s efforts to increase foreign investment in U.S. shipyards. They follow a similar set of meetings days earlier in South Korea (Defense Daily, March 1).
During this visit, the Navy Secretary also met with the Japanese National Security Adviser, Minister of Defense, and Head of Navy. The Navy said this was Del Toro’s third visit to Japan as secretary.
These efforts are part of Del Toro’s push for a new Maritime Statecraft that he first articulated during a September speech. It seeks to build U.S. and allied commercial and naval maritime power, in part to counter the rise of Chinese power (Defense Daily, Sept. 29, 2023).
During a Feb. 15 speech at the WEST 2024 conference, Del Toro argued the U.S. Navy needs a more effective voyage repair strategy. While in the past the service was allowed three voyage repairs annually, Del Toro said he is trying to increase that to six voyage repairs overseas per year, to include more work in Japan and South Korea in particular.
He said this push will be “so that we can actually start doing voyage repairs in Japan, Korea, India and other places as well, too, to ensure that it’s a good relationship going into it before we ever are called to conflict. Hopefully, never, but nevertheless, we have to be prepared for that.”
The Navy started to expand foreign maintenance of its ship in 2022, when the first Military Sealift Command’s (MSC) Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Charles Drew (T-AKE 10) conducted maintenance work at the Larsen & Toubro Ltd. shipyard in India (Defense Daily, Aug. 18, 2022).