The Navy has been through a lot over the past several months.

Ships have stayed at sea longer than planned. Sailors have missed more time with their families. Aircraft have flown hard. Weapons have been fired in numbers we have not seen in decades. Maintenance has been pushed to the right because the mission came first.

We cannot keep shrinking the number of ships while expanding the number of missions and pretend the math will somehow work.

Now the bills are going to start coming due.

Ships will return needing repairs. Aircraft will need maintenance. Magazines will need to be refilled. Sailors will need time at home. Families that have carried an enormous burden will want some normalcy back. All of that is understandable. But what happens next will tell us a lot about the future of the United States Navy.

We can spend the next few years talking about how hard the Iran fight was, how tired the force is, and how much everything costs. We can lower expectations, reduce deployments, accept fewer ships at sea, and convince ourselves that this is simply the new reality.

Or we can decide to get better.

That may sound overly simple, but it isn’t. This is the choice facing this generation of Navy leaders, Pentagon officials, members of Congress, and the defense industrial base. Iran did not create the Navy’s problems. It exposed them.

Listen to sailors and learn the right lesson

The extended deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln has become the most visible example of the strain on the force. Sailors and families have expressed frustration about deployment length, uncertainty, limited port calls, and conditions aboard the ship.

When we ask young Americans to spend month after month away from their spouses and children, they have earned the right to tell us when things are not working. Navy leaders should pay attention to quality of life, communications, food, sleep, medical care, and the information families receive back home.

But we should be careful about the conclusion we draw from their frustration. The lesson cannot simply be that deployments should never run long again. Wars don’t care about deployment schedules.

America’s national security commitments don’t disappear because a carrier strike group has been gone for eight or nine months.

Sometimes the mission requires more.

The real lesson is that America needs enough Navy that asking more of our sailors during a crisis does not become the only option available. That means more ships, more aircraft, more weapons, more logistics capacity, and more people.

It also means accepting something we sometimes became uncomfortable saying during the long years of peacetime operations: Serving in the military is supposed to be hard.

We should take care of sailors and their families. We should fix unnecessary problems and hold leaders accountable for poor decisions. But we also need a Navy that expects its people to be tough enough to fight and win a war.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

The maintenance bill is coming

The bigger problem may be what happens when these ships finally come home.

Engines accumulate hours. Aircraft fly more sorties. Radars and combat systems operate continuously. Parts wear out. Repairs that might normally happen during a deployment get delayed because the ship is needed on station.

Eventually all of that work has to be done. And the Navy was already struggling with maintenance before the war. Public shipyards are overloaded. Private repair yards are stretched. Submarine maintenance has been a problem for years. Surface ships routinely spend longer in maintenance than planned.

Now we are going to add ships returning from combat operations. We should not act surprised when the backlog grows. The question is whether we do something about it.

That means putting real money into ship repair capacity. It means expanding public and private yards. It means training more welders, electricians, pipe fitters, and other skilled workers. It means using predictive maintenance and better data, so we know what is going to fail before it fails.

And it means getting serious about spare parts.

None of this is glamorous. There are no ribbon cuttings for having the right pump sitting on a warehouse shelf. But wars are often won by the side that can keep equipment operating.

Refill the magazines

Iran also reminded us that modern warfare burns through weapons quickly.

Missiles that take years to develop and months or years to produce can disappear from a ship’s magazine in minutes.

That should scare us, not because the Navy performed poorly — it performed extremely well — but because Iran is not China.

Imagine the weapons requirements of a sustained fight across thousands of miles of the Pacific against an adversary with a large navy, advanced aircraft, submarines, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and enormous industrial capacity.

The math gets uncomfortable quickly.

We should treat every weapon fired during the Iran conflict as a data point.

How quickly can we replace it?

If the answer is measured in years, we have a problem.

This is where the Pentagon and Congress need to stop treating munitions like boutique acquisition programs. We need production lines that can surge. We need long-term contracts that give manufacturers confidence to invest. We need second sources for critical components.

And we need deeper magazines.

You cannot surge missile production after the shooting starts.

Don’t become the Royal Navy

There is a historical warning here.

The British Royal Navy did not wake up one morning and suddenly stop being the world’s dominant navy.

The decline happened slowly.

Britain still had excellent ships. It still had talented sailors. It still had proud traditions. What it gradually lost was mass. The commitments remained large while the fleet became smaller. That should sound familiar.

America expects its Navy to deter China, operate in Europe, protect shipping in the Middle East, defend the homeland, reassure allies, and respond whenever something goes wrong anywhere in the world.

We cannot keep shrinking the number of ships while expanding the number of missions and pretend the math will somehow work. Eventually something gives. Iran gave us a warning. We should take it.

RELATED: How to renew American scientific research

BSIP/UIG/Getty Images

Get better

There will be a temptation after this conflict to focus almost entirely on recovery. The Navy absolutely needs to recover. But recovery cannot become retreat. This needs to be a period of brutal institutional learning.

What broke? What ran out? What took too long to repair? Which supply chains failed?

Capture those lessons and move out — don’t spend five years studying them.

Some fixes will require money. Others will require leadership. Many will require getting rid of processes and assumptions that made sense during peacetime but make no sense after experiencing sustained combat.

This should change how the Navy trains, buys weapons, maintains ships, designs the fleet, and supports families.

Most importantly, it should change the Navy’s mindset.

The service should come out of this tougher than it went in.

The choice

Every generation gets a few moments when the direction of an institution can change.

This is one of them.

Iran showed what sustained combat does to a Navy. A war with a peer competitor would ask far more. So we have a choice — slump our shoulders and talk about how difficult this is and how far behind we feel.

Or we can stop talking, learn from the last couple of years, and get better.

Fix the ships. Refill the magazines. Expand the yards.

Take care of Navy families. Demand better leadership. And expect toughness from the force.

The United States Navy is still the most capable navy in the world. The question is whether we intend to keep it that way.

Iran should not be remembered as the fight that wore down the U.S. Navy. It should be remembered as the fight that woke it up.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.