The US Navy figured out how to reload its missile ships at sea, preparing for possible conflict with China

The USS Chosin used a TRAM device to load a missile canister into the ship’s vertical launching system on October 11, 2024.

The US Navy has developed a new way of reloading its destroyers, cruisers, and other sizable warships with missiles at sea, as it contends with the growing naval threat from China.

The Wall Street Journal gained exclusive access to a recent test off the coast of California, where US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro described the new capability as “critical to any future conflict in the Pacific.”

The technology is based on repurposed 1990s prototype equipment and uses a hydraulically propelled system that transports missile canisters from a supply ship via a zipline to place them into a launch cell, it reported.

TRAM was tested on land in July and then at sea for the first time in October, off the coast of San Diego, where Del Toro touted it as a “powerful deterrent” to US rivals.

“Without the ability to rearm at sea, our service combatants must return to port, sometimes thousands of miles away,” Del Toro said at the time.

This could put them out of action for weeks at a time.

Del Toro said the US Navy expected to start deploying TRAM within the next two to three years.

In a speech at Columbia University in December 2022, Del Toro said delivering the “game-changing” capability to rearm US warships at sea was one of his top priorities.

China has grown increasingly assertive in the Pacific in recent months, crossing into the airspace and waters around Taiwan, a key US partner, and carrying out maritime gray-zone operations in the South China Sea against the Philippines, an ally the US is treaty-bound to defend.

To date, the US has only been able to reload its warships’ cruise missile launchers from solid ground, or in sheltered harbors.

In September, the USS Dewey reloaded at an allied naval base in Darwin, Australia.

But “if conflict were to erupt, or if something were to happen, being able to go to various different locations around the Indo-Pacific, it makes it much faster for us to reload,” Nicholas Maruca, the commanding officer of the USS Dewey, told the Journal.

However, the technology alone might not be enough.

Nick Childs, a senior naval analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, noted in a recent military blog that the system has only been trialed in “fairly benign” sea conditions and that the Navy needs to distribute enough equipment, replenishment ships, and missiles around the fleet, and also modify warships to receive them.

“However they are accomplished,” he said of reloading solutions, they “will be no silver bullet for navies.”