U.S. Navy destroyers and cruisers needing to leave the ongoing battle against Iran-backed Houthi rebel missile and drone barrages in the Red Sea to reload their Mk 41 Vertical Launching System (VLS) missile cells are causing a presence gap and “a real challenge,” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said Wednesday (Jan 2025) at the annual Surface Navy Association conference. That challenge extends not only to the Red Sea campaign, he said, but especially to a future war with China across the vast West Pacific expanse as well, The War Zone reports.
As such, continuing development of the Transferrable Reload At-sea Method (TRAM) to reload missiles on warships while at sea will be critical to keeping large surface combatants on station in such a contingency, Del Toro said at the conference, which TWZ attended. Navy leaders have framed the ongoing Red Sea battles as the most sustained kinetic action the service has seen since World War II, with hundreds of munitions expended since hostilities commenced in October 2023, draining some ships of a sizable portion of their missile and gun ammunition arsenals. You can read our complete breakdown of how many of each missile here.
“We simply cannot afford to give up two weeks for destroyers and cruisers and future frigates to be able to reload,” Del Toro said. “This critical capability will significantly increase our ability to maintain forward presence without the need to withdraw from combat for extended periods of in-port reloading time.”
The TRAM has been in development for years and was successfully demonstrated in October, when the Military Sealift Command dry cargo ship USNS Washington Chambers (T-AKE 11) pulled alongside the Ticonderoga class cruiser USS Chosin (CG-65) and transferred an empty VLS weapon container to the cruiser while underway off southern California. Go here to read TWZ coverage of that milestone.
Sailors used TRAM to move a missile canister along rails that were attached to Chosin’s VLS modules, the Navy said when announcing the successful test. The canister was then tilted into a vertical position and lowered into a VLS cell via the TRAM’s cable and pulley system.
The hydraulically powered TRAM can be used while a ship is undergoing underway replenishment, which is a regular yet demanding evolution where various supplies are ferried from a supply ship to a warship as the two vessels move in parallel. Last fall’s test was highly anticipated, with Capitol Hill lawmakers taking a major interest in the capability. Before that, a pier-side trial at the Naval Surface Warfare Centers Port Hueneme division outside San Diego in July was also a success.
Del Toro said after the test that TRAM was on track to be fielded in two to three years. But his comments this week reinforce the fact that a maritime war against China featuring an American armada dispersed across the West Pacific will require an at-sea reloading capability.
In such a conflict, Navy bases in Japan would likely be cut off by China, forcing U.S. ships to rearm at Guam or locations even further from the South China Sea and East China Sea, where such a war would be expected to rage if Beijing invades Taiwan or tensions in the South China Sea turn red hot. Ashore reloading hubs would likely become prime targets for the enemy as well. There’s also the fact that a Navy destroyer or cruiser could be left at least partially undefended when transiting a naval war zone with empty missile cells.
At-sea reloading would cut down on the transit time for re-upping a warship’s munitions, while allowing such ships to stay at least closer to the action, even though rearming would likely take place at least some distance from the core of the fighting.
“The opponent would have weakened our fleet even without scoring a punch” if warships have to leave the battle to reload, James Holmes, a maritime strategy professor at the Naval War College, told Navy Times in 2017, after then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson announced the effort that would become TRAM. “If we keep having to rotate cruisers or destroyers back to rear areas to reload, the opponent has subtracted that much combat power from the fleet.”
Such capabilities were part of the fleet before the end of the Cold War, but fell by the wayside after the Soviet Union’s fall amidst a broader U.S. military drawdown. Cranes were installed on the earlier cruisers back in the 1980s to assist with reloading, but it was a time-consuming and perilous tasker, analysts told Navy Times.
“It’s stressful for the equipment, it’s stressful for the people and it’s a challenge that’s been looked at for many years,” Eric Wertheim, a naval analyst and author of “Combat Fleets of the World,” told Navy Times. “It was very hard to do, and it was not very practicable, so when the need for it diminished, it just fell by the wayside.”
It remains unclear where American warships fighting in the Red Sea are currently heading to reload their munitions, and U.S. Naval Forces Central Command officials declined to confirm those locations to TWZThursday. One likely reloading option is Naval Support Activity Souda Bay, which hosts rearming capabilities and sits aboard the strategically located Greek island of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Such a voyage entails about 1,900 miles and would require a Navy warship to transit north out of the Red Sea via the Suez Canal.
Rearming at the Navy’s base in Bahrain is a roughly 2,500-mile voyage, and would involve leaving the Red Sea south through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and transiting the strategic chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz. Diego Garcia is about the same distance, deep in the Indian Ocean. Some ships may be getting some munitions closer to the Red Sea, in partner nations, but it would be in a far more limited capacity.
Allies in the Red Sea mission have also had to travel far to reload before returning to the area of operations. TWZ reported in February on the British destroyer HMS Diamond steaming all the way to Gibraltar to get more missiles after operating in the Red Sea.
The Houthis have been attacking ships with missiles and drones, sometimes at a near-daily clip, since October 2023. But they signaled this week that they would halt their attacks if a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas takes effect.
Even if the Navy’s frenzied mission in the Red Sea soon ends, it has proven the need for an at-sea reloading capability. The sea service has gotten a taste during the Red Sea conflict of why the capability is so badly needed, even as it races to prepare for a future war in a very different theater that nonetheless presents some of the same challenges.
