A powerful naval force is now concentrated from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean in support of continuing operations against the Islamic Republic of Iran — including two aircraft carriers, six amphibious assault ships, and 19 cruisers and destroyers. Just this week, President Donald Trump declared he would re-impose a blockade on Iranian ports, while U.S. attacks against coastal and island targets continued unabated. How long can the U.S. Navy keep this armada forward deployed? That we even ask this question highlights the visible decline of American Seapower. In 1945, with over 6,000 ships, the United States Navy was a truly global seapower. Today, some 80 years later, the fleet is so diminished that Americans quietly doubt if it can sustain operations against Iran — which have once again been renewed. A renewed naval blockade — even a distant barrier in the Arabian Sea — means prolonged operating tempo for ships and personnel. Ships that have been in-theater since February that have been deployed for a total 10 months and more, must be rotated out and replaced. Keeping so many ships in the CENTCOM Area of Responsibility means a Navy that can only focus on one region, effectively abandoning its global reach.

What happened? Three things. First, the fleet lost its ships. The U.S. Navy listed 6,768 ships in 1945, enough to last for several decades. Even during Vietnam, the fleet still numbered over 900 ships. Yet by the later 1970s, it had fallen to something like 450. With the Reagan resurgence, fleet size rebounded to nearly 600 ships. With the Cold War’s end, however, a long shrinkage began. Today, the Navy’s useful order-of-battle stands at around 180 ships: Carriers (CVN), “large-deck amphibs” (LHA/LHD, LSD/LPH), attack submarines (SSN), and guided missile destroyers (DDG). As a critical counterpoint, China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) now has more battle force ships than the U.S. America’s battle force ships are big and powerful, yet they are not adequately supplemented by ships for necessary subsidiary missions, like patrol, escort, and minesweeping. The now-infamous Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was designed to meet this need, and in the last 20 years, 35 were built. They are now being retired — some brand new.

In the words of Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) then-chair of the House Armed Services Committee in 2022, “We can’t use them, number one because they’re not ready to do anything. Number two, when they are, they still break down.”

Hence, the U.S. Navy is no longer a balanced fleet. Second, a shrinking fleet means fewer ships at sea. It is a standard rule of thumb that you need three hulls to keep one deployed overseas. In times of high tension and crisis, ships are kept at sea as long as humanly possible to make sure enough seaborne firepower is at hand to satisfy a demanding commander-in-chief, mollify queasy allies, and allegedly “deter” evil adversaries. The USS Abraham Lincoln, for example, was deployed in November 2025 and is now in the Arabian Sea, over 210 days without a port visit — a Navy record. The result: precious ships get worn out, and then sent to put out more fires, until they break. Moreover, when worn out and broken they finally return home, there are simply not enough places to fix them and get them back into working order. Maintenance facilities are so limited that recent submarine overhauls have taken as many as eight years to complete; one nuclear boat, the USS Boise, was scrapped after 10 years of repairs. $800 million was spent, and the job was only 25% complete! The situation is so bad that 40% of the Navy submarine force cannot be deployed because of maintenance bottlenecks and contractor incompetence. Yet submarines get highest priority. Things are much worse for the surface fleet. A broken maintenance and repair system makes an already small fleet even smaller.

The third factor quietly undermining the Navy is the easiest to overlook. It is also the biggest threat to the Navy’s future: the fatigue and demoralization of its sailors. Long overseas deployments, especially those that keep getting extended, break the morale of both the sailor and of the family waiting back home.

when being the global hegemon requires me to keep a massive amount of assets constantly deployed globally without rest

Vice Admiral Phil Wisecup (ret.) knows. When he was Navy Scheduler in the 1990s, he co-authored a study that recommended Navy deployments be limited to six months — with only urgent exceptions. The Navy adopted this standard. Then, in the crisis atmosphere that swept Washington after 9/11, it was just thrown away. For a quarter-century now, the U.S. Navy has been operating under wartime conditions — at least as far as ship deployments are concerned. It's like World War II again, when ships were sent across the Pacific, not to return home until war’s end; or Vietnam, when carriers were kept in the Gulf of Tonkin until exhausted, when they would return home for a month of R&R, only to go right back again to Yankee Station. Yet those examples of sustained high intensity combat lasted just a few years. Pushing sailors like that for 25 years straight is to push them so hard as to push them out. As with destroyers and Amphibs on blockade duty in the Arabian Sea, 10-month deployments are the Navy norm. The poster child for this is America’s latest and greatest nuclear aircraft carrier: the USS Gerald Ford. It became the quintessential example of crew exhaustion and demoralization before ending its record-breaking, 11 month deployment in the Middle East (June 2025 to May 2026). The $3 billion Ford is the first ship of a new class, with new systems (electromagnetic catapults and arrestor gear, new radar arrays, new ordnance elevators, etc.), including a new vacuum human waste disposal system. To pack so many premature systems into one ship has meant 20 bleeding edge technologies and 20 potential points of failure. It has been called “a monument to everything wrong with the US Navy.”

When the toilets broke, so did the crew.

one of the funniest phrases I've read recently

but yes, amateurs talk about how many missiles we can launch, professionals study toilets and sewage systems

There was a huge fire in the ship’s laundry on March 12 of this year — which many believe was deliberately set — that ended the ordeal. From the Red Sea, where it had been stationed for so many months during the Iran and Houthi wars, it limped to Crete for repairs, then on home. What can be done? No matter how much money is spent (in 2017 it was estimated that a 355-ship fleet would cost more than $3 trillion to build and maintain; that would be much more today), there is no path ahead to grow the fleet in less than three decades. The lofty “Golden Fleet” modernization plan, which aims to swell the number to 450 ships, is seeking at least $267 billion just to get started, according to the Navy in May. A hortatory start is not a solution. Yet analysts note that, “despite a doubling of the shipbuilding budget over two decades, fleet size has not meaningfully increased.” The 2026 Shipbuilding Plan talks big about “changing how we do business” and “delivering accountability” — yet talk faces 50 entrenched years of doing things the old way, with zero accountability. Moreover, America’s rancorous politics is not conducive to sustained, and ruinously expensive, fleet expansion. The likelihood is that the Navy will shoulder on with its rusty, overstretched fleet, and with luck avoid a further decline in ship numbers. Perhaps, over time, shipyard modernization will boost maintenance and repair schedules. Yet the Navy must eventually face the reality of seapower limitation.

So as to the question: Can we sustain the fleet off Iran? The short answer is, yes, but. The U.S. Navy is fully capable of putting a hefty group of high-end warships anywhere on the world ocean, and keeping it there, through rotation, for as long as it is ordered to do so. Yet understand: This is the new Navy maximum-norm. The service, as in the 1920s and 1930s, is once again a single-mission force; it can go to one place and do something. Yet it is no longer the truly global seapower it was during World War II and the Cold War.

hmm, you're telling me that the material condition of the Navy's ships is affecting power projection capabilities? interesting concept, I'll have to read up on it

Furthermore, the “something” it can do is also limited. That high-end armada in the CENTCOM AOR — all 27 big ships — is in no position to go “in harm’s way.” Whatever it does, it cannot afford to lose precious ships. There are simply not enough of them, and not near enough capacity to expeditiously repair them if battle-damaged. The iron reality of limited American Seapower is stark. It can put a modest armada off a foreign shore, and keep it there. It just cannot afford to get into a real fight.

The collapse of negotiations between the US and Iran can be traced to a single point of failure: the inability of the US military to keep the Strait of Hormuz open in the face of Iranian opposition. The challenge has been long anticipated. The Navy has been thinking about it for 45 years, ever since it escorted tankers through the Persian Gulf in the 1980s and successfully thwarted Iranian efforts to control traffic. As a junior Marine officer, I participated in amphibious planning exercises to capture islands in the Strait. Yet, when the moment came for the Navy to implement its plans, nothing happened. So why can’t the world’s most powerful military secure the Strait against a country that has no navy? The answer lies partly at the political level, but partly also in a long-term failure to acquire the capabilities needed for this kind of operation, despite knowing that it was strategically critical and likely to occur. The stakes are worth restating. If the Strait was secure, oil and natural gas would flow, with prices soon declining and shortages disappearing. The US and world economies would rebound.

The United States could probably live with the rest of the current status quo: It has greatly damaged the Iranian nuclear program, military forces, defense industry and particularly Iran’s ability to manufacture ballistic missiles.

Much of Iran’s leadership has been killed, depriving it of experience and some internal cohesion. The 24,000 US and Israeli strikes have undoubtedly done major damage that is not yet visible.

With assured passage through the Strait, the US would not need to allow a reconstruction fund, sanctions relief, or return of frozen assets. Time would be on our side. Instead, the two sides have resumed strikes against each other and reinstated their respective blockades. Thus, any traffic requires approval, or at least acquiescence, by both parties, and both are signaling an unwillingness to change their stance. In theory, this is when the US military, and especially the Navy, should be stepping up in a big way and yet the situation is a stalemate. How did we get here? In the early days of the conflict, the Navy may have lacked sufficient assets in theater, as shown by the later movement of 4,500 Marines into the region. Political assumptions about a short conflict or the lack of Iranian reaction may have constrained military preparations. Later, the administration’s fear of casualties may have limited naval operations. Opening the Strait would be a major combat operation involving Navy destroyers escorting cargo ships, Army helicopters attacking speed boats, Air Force and Navy fixed-wing aircraft overhead to strike Iranian missile batteries and perhaps Marines seizing islands. However, blaming the political establishment alone is too easy. Much criticism must also fall on the military, particularly the Navy, which has “Keep[ing] the seas open and free” in its mission statement — but has not given senior decisionmakers acceptable options because of historical, glaring gaps in capability that it has not addressed.

Specifically, the service has long ignored mine warfare and instead depends on allies for this capability. Dozens of Navy professional articles have bemoaned its weakness in mine clearance, pointing to previous failures in Korea (1951), the Persian Gulf (1985) and Desert Storm (1990-1991). For examples, see here, here, here, here, here, and here, and that just scratches the surface. And yet, the last of the Avenger class of mine countermeasure vessels (MCM) has retired, while the replacements (mine clearance modules on LCVs) have been few, delayed and plagued with problems. The problem is not money. Even the large Navy budgets of fiscal 2026 and 2027 contain no ships for this neglected mission. Indeed, the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan does not even mention the mission.

In addition, the Navy has long neglected convoy operations and contending with asymmetric adversaries in constricted waters, preferring to focus on sea control against other navies in the open ocean. The shipbuilding plan has tens of billions for carriers, battleships, destroyers and submarines but never mentions these kinds of missions. Compounding the problem, the last two classes of frigates intended for this mission had been unsatisfactory (LCS and the Constellation class). The current frigate plan relies on the Coast Guard’s Homeland Security cutter as a baseline — sensibly using an existing design but taking risk with a platform designed for a very different mission. The administration may argue that any criticism demeans the sacrifices of naval personnel. That’s untrue; they have acted with skill and determination. The failure is at the highest level, not on the deckplates. The sailors running these missions deserve help. The Navy needs to rebuild its countermine capabilities, and adjusting the Pentagon’s FY27 budget proposal would be a start. Maybe that involves refinement of minesweeping packages on the LCS. Maybe it involves a new class of ships. The Navy has used some uncrewed vessels for minesweeping, an approach with great potential but that needs deployment at scale. Ultimately, the Navy needs something like in-stride minesweeping capability, the ability to clear a channel in hours or days, not weeks or months. It’s also clear that an implication of current US policy is that the United States must retain some of these capabilities itself and cannot always rely on allies and partners. The Navy also needs to rediscover its skills at convoy escort. During the world wars, the US Navy was a master at this. Those skills have apparently atrophied. As part of this effort, the Navy needs to test and settle on its doctrine. Traditionally, escorts have sailed with the convoy, providing close-in protection. That worked for the one small convoy that the Navy ran under Project Freedom, but the Navy’s new concept is to create a safe corridor from a distance, without tying warships to particular groups of cargo ships. That sounds great. Will it work?

Finally, the Navy, like the other services, needs to develop mechanisms to counter drones. Firing $5.3 million SM-3s at $30,000 Iranian Shahed drones is not sustainable. Ashore, adding a counter-drone battery is relatively straightforward. Integrating it into a ship’s fire control system is complicated, but necessary. This is not just a Middle East issue. If Iran succeeds in establishing the principle that neighboring countries can control constricted waterways, other straits worldwide might come under national control, and the whole world would suffer, including the United States. Since the beginning of the republic, the United States has stood for freedom of navigation in the world’s oceans. Its first overseas conflict (1801-1805) was against the Barbary pirates in North Africa, whose attacks imperiled that freedom. Abandoning the principle would badly damage our commerce and affect every American. The administration needs to fix both the military and political pieces of the problem.

The United States has not opened a new major public shipyard since 1908, when Congress authorized the construction of the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii. While some public yards built ships in centuries past, today all four government yards maintain the Navy’s most prestigious nuclear-powered ships and submarines. That may be about to change. At a recent Washington Times event, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, said the Trump administration is “pushing hard for an additional public shipyard” and the ability to scale US Navy ship maintenance. Expanding the workers and facilities for ship repair has supporters and critics. But there is no debate that the organic industrial base (government-owned) is dilapidated and in disrepair across the armed forces. Thankfully, a lot of time and money have been spent over the past decade to begin rehabilitating this failing infrastructure, with more to come. Visit any public yard today, and you’ll hear and see heavy machinery building new dry docks, new piers, and new factories. Indeed, under construction at Pearl Harbor is the eye-wateringly large Dry Dock 5, the single highest-value project in US naval history. This new dock is necessary in order to accommodate fast-attack submarines and nuclear boomers that are much larger than their predecessors and the largest submarines ever built by the US Navy.

But while navy yards are straining under heavy machinery and equipment, they are also struggling under a burden one might find surprising: tariffs. At one East Coast repair yard, a critical part was stuck at the Canadian border due to a lack of funds to pay tariffs on equipment needed to keep its facilities humming. To meet nuclear reactor servicing requirements, a rail-mounted dock crane needed an upgrade to a special-purpose standard designated and certified to support lifting operations aboard vessels and at shore facilities. Part of the general-purpose-to-special-purpose upgrade involves replacing parts in the crane’s Broken Shaft Detection System; the nearest acceptable manufacturer is a Canadian company. A recent tariff dispute at the northern border resulted in 44 calendar days lost between the original delivery date and the new projected delivery date to the shipyard. The US Navy at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard ultimately paid $60,000 in tariffs on top of the $269,000 parts cost—over 18 percent of the total adjusted contract for one piece of equipment, according to a shipyard spokesperson. Multiply this across facilities and yards, and the taxpayer is spending a lot to pay national security tariffs. While there are explicit defense exemptions and duty-free entry clauses allowed under current regulations and in Pentagon contracts, items are still slipping through the cracks. Indeed, government-wide exceptions “are sometimes difficult and uncertain to administer.” Further, figuring out what is exempted, when, and by whom is a winding maze of legalize that shipyard workers don’t have time to navigate, with a backlog of repairs plaguing the Navy.

It is clear tariffs have become far too confusing. Initial tariffs were covered by emergency authority, which was then modified and partly replaced by another, temporary authority, which is soon to be modified by yet another authority. Exemptions exist but are also unstable, including Canadian and Mexican goods covered by the USMCA, which is itself under review. The Navy’s own evaluation found “inadequate facilities and equipment have caused maintenance delays, resulting in more than 1,300 lost operational days for [aircraft] carriers and over 12,500 lost operational days for submarines.” This is too long, with the Navy in a wartime surge as part of Operation Epic Fury against Iran and continuing counter-blockade missions. While service leaders are working overtime to mitigate delays, nuclear-powered ships are in constant global demand. The US Navy cannot afford more lost time at repair yards to get docked ships to sea. All levers must be used to expedite ship repairs, including tariff relief when necessary. Using taxpayer funds to buy a part and to pay a tariff on that same part is nonsensical. Using public money provided by Congress to the Defense Department, then sending it to another federal agency for a fee on goods, is obviously a waste in an area where we cannot afford it. Congress and the executive branch must work together to end this circular shell game that is damaging national security. All the military services should have broad and specific waivers in effect for equipment purchases that sustain force generation no matter how tariffs evolve. The government offers numerous waivers, including for select Chinese consumer electronics. While the Pentagon has reiterated the duty-free entry certificates, they are clearly not enough or widely known.

Last year, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) included a provision to reinforce the tariff exemption for defense materials. But it was dropped from the final bill and a reporting requirement inserted instead regarding the impact of tariffs and trade agreements on the defense enterprise. While the broader tariff goals to encourage American output and reindustrialization are important and overdue, they cannot harm the US military nor slow down ship repairs at public yards domestically. The US Navy’s public shipyards need help now to keep maintenance on track as larger discussions about a possible new yard are underway.

The Pentagon doesn’t have a unified strategy for investing in a key hypersonic missile capability for the Navy and the Army — and failing to figure one out could result in additional program delays and inefficient use of funds, a new watchdog report warns. The Navy and the Army are both developing their own versions of what the Navy calls its Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) capability, with the services collectively aiming to invest more than $50 billion into the hypersonic effort. The Navy is updating its Zumwalt-class destroyers with a vertical launch system to accommodate the CPS missiles, and plans to include the system onto some Virginia-class submarines. Meanwhile, the Army is also pursuing its own Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, also called Dark Eagle, that launches from the ground, and is responsible for producing the missile glide body for both Army and Navy hypersonic endeavors. Each missile in the envisioned 224-missile stockpile is estimated to cost tens of millions of dollars, says the new report, published today by the Government Accountability Office. “While Navy and Army officials told GAO that they coordinate with each other, the services largely manage investment decisions for these programs separately, which contributes to inefficiencies and delays,” the GAO report says.

The Navy already has encountered several delays so far, GAO said, and the service is facing a roughly two-year delay on modernizing its three Zumwalt-class destroyers to accommodate CPS missiles. Likewise, it determined that the initial ship, the USS Zumwalt, was 94 percent complete with updates as of January 2026 — yet still is falling behind schedule due to “unplanned work.” Flight testing for CPS on the Zumwalt-class destroyers was originally scheduled for 2025, but that is now postponed until 2027 stemming from “funding and testing challenges,” the watchdog said. Furthermore, the CPS program is running up against quality and production issues, undermining the ability to reach production goals of 12 missile rounds annually, the report said. Specifically, the report found that prime contractor Lockheed Martin is facing production challenges to build the CPS missiles “at anticipated rates and costs,” and only has the capacity to build a maximum of six to seven rounds annually. Lockheed did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Breaking Defense, but the company told DefenseScoop that it is working to bolster production and manufacturing processes. “We’re confident in the quality of our capabilities and are working across the industrial base to strengthen supply chain resilience,” the firm said in a statement, per DefenseScoop. “Specific questions regarding the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon system should be directed to the Office of the Secretary of War.”

Meanwhile, the GAO report found that the Navy is “largely making investment decisions on a program-by-program basis, rather than doing so from a portfolio-wide perspective.” GAO pointed to challenges related to identifying issues with production throughput across both services, while noting that the Navy is the one that oversees the missile body production line.“The Navy cannot make decisions in isolation since the Army is buying its own missiles and manages key aspects of production,” the GAO report said. “Despite these complexities, the Navy and the Army do not have a comprehensive strategy to guide CPS portfolio investments in a way that facilitates effective and efficient allocation of funding to achieve the capability envisioned in the services’ respective plans. Without such a strategy, the Navy and the Army create the potential for both additional delay and inefficient use of taxpayer funds.” As a result, the GAO recommended that the secretary of defense ensure that the under secretary of defense for acquisition work with both secretaries for the Navy and Army to develop a “comprehensive strategy that outlines how all programs involved with delivering CPS portfolio capability should coordinate and regularly review investment decisions.” The Department of Defense agreed with this recommendation without further comment, per the report. The Navy did not have additional comment to share when reached by Breaking Defense.