U.S. Navy warship lost power and propulsion for hours, defence official says

In this photo, provided by the Philippine Coast Guard, United States Navy USS Higgins (DDG 76) conduct freedom of navigation operations (FONOP) at the South China Sea on Wednesday Aug. 13, 2025. (Philippine Coast Guard via AP)

A U.S. Navy warship lost power and propulsion for several hours in the Indo-Pacific on Tuesday, a U.S. defence official said, after suffering what a Navy statement called an “engineering casualty” in its electrical system.

Such a situation would leave the ship, the guided-missile destroyer USS Higgins, and its crew of about 300 “helpless” in the water, a naval analyst told CNN. There were no injuries among those aboard, the Navy said.

The Higgins “experienced a loss of power throughout the ship,” Cmdr. Matthew Comer, a spokesperson for the U.S. 7th Fleet, said in the statement Friday.

“Initial reports indicate an electrical malfunction, which may have produced sparking or smoke that ceased once power was removed,” Comer said.

Power and propulsion have been restored aboard the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, Comer said.

But a defence official told CNN the power and propulsion outage lasted “several hours.”

That’s a significant amount of time for the ship to lose its ability to control its movements in the sea, with electrically operated radars and combat defences inoperative, experts told CNN.

“The ship is helpless, electronically blind and immobile,” said Carl Schuster, a former U.S. Navy captain.

Emergency diesel generators would just power communications and air conditioning, he said.

The Navy statement did not say where in the Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility – which stretches from the waters off the U.S. West Coast to the western border of India, and from the North Pole to Antarctica – the incident occurred.

The cause of the problem is under investigation, the Navy said.

Arleigh Burke-class destroyers like the Higgins are the workhorses of the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet, with more than 70 in service.

The Higgins, commissioned in 1999, carries a crew of about 300 and is homeported in Yokosuka, Japan.

At 505-foot-long and displacing more than 8,200 tons, it carries the Aegis combat system and has vertical launch tubes for a range of missiles, including Tomahawk land-attack missiles.

A fire broke out on another U.S. Navy vessel, the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, in the ship’s laundry area last month, CNN previously reported.

The fire on March 12 was not combat-related, the U.S. military said at the time. Two sailors received medical treatment for non-life-threatening injuries and were in stable condition.

By Brad Lendon, CNN