Is South China Sea warship breakdown a sign US is ‘taxing reserve capacity’?

A US guided-missile destroyer that was adrift in the South China Sea without power last month is a sign that America is taxing its reserve capacity as its operation against Iran drags on, according to an analyst.

“This is an extremely unusual occurrence and a variety of equipment and process failures would have to have taken place,” said Brad Martin, a former US Navy captain who is now a senior policy researcher at Washington-based think tank the Rand Corporation.

“Failures such as this are a predictable outcome of issues such as deferred maintenance and training gaps,” he said, adding that more details were needed to get a full picture of the incident.

The USS Benfold lost power due to an engineering failure involving its generators on July 24, the US Navy said in a statement cited by USNI News on Friday.

It left the nearly 10,000-tonne Arleigh Burke-class vessel stalled for four days without power in the South China Sea.

US Seventh Fleet spokesman Commander Matthew Comer said in the statement that the destroyer lost power while conducting routine operations in the Indo-Pacific with the USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group.