Gunboat or showboat: Can the Navy truly sustain a long war with Iran?

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.

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. 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.

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.