The most likely scenario for the repair is that the Navy will have to send Fitz home on a heavy-lift vessel, said Bryan Clark, a retired submariner and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.  "There is no way they can get it repaired overseas,” Clark said. “What they are doing now is trying to determine whether it can be repaired enough to make it home on its own power or if they should put it on a heavy-lift ship. From there it’s going to go into a long repair period at one of the private yards.” Clark said General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego would be a logical place to do the repair.

The most likely scenario would be a modified version of the America-class big-deck amphib that would add two catapults to launch aircraft, similar to World War II-era straight-deck escort carriers. 

The newest Ford-class vessels have a service life of 50 years, but the Pentagon may find itself confronted more forcefully by China and Russia by the 2030s, according to a January 2017 report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a nonprofit think tank that advocates for a Navy reconfiguration. 

"Once the Ford comes online you can have the East Coast carriers essentially cover the Middle East with short gaps and have the West Coast carriers fill the gaps in the Pacific while [the carrier] Reagan is in its spring maintenance availability," Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments told Defense News.

Getting the Ford earlier would be a win for Fleet Forces, which has been trying to get its new optimized fleet response plan on track. 

“This is a mission kill on Fitzgerald that will require months and likely more than $100 million to repair,” Bryan Clark, a former naval officer and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments told The National Interest.