To increase the resilience of shipboard power systems, this paper presents an optimal defense strategy to protect critical lines against attacks. In the modeling, an attack is considered to destroy one critical bus, which may result in that all lines are connected to this bus will be out of service unless protection is enabled. Furthermore, after one true attack occurs, the network restoration is performed as soon as possible to pick up the critical loads and maintain system operation. To address the uncertain location of the attacks, a tri-level robust optimal defense strategy is set up to protect the critical lines under the worst attack. Moreover, a nested column-constraint generation method is employed to solve this model. A 60-bus shipboard power system is studied to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the defense method.