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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Undercover reporter James O'Keefe has struck again.
The U.S. Navy has placed a senior Pentagon official on administrative leave after a hidden camera from a "gay" date with O'Keefe on July 6 appeared to catch the official criticizing President Donald Trump and vowing to reverse the administration's policy changes.
'Why do the gays in DC spill all the beans to me each and every single time?'
In footage shared to social media by O'Keefe on Wednesday, a disguised O'Keefe is out with an individual he identified as the director of business operations in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, Brandon Newsom. On the video, Newsom claims to "oversee all corporate ops, so like HR, IT, security."
Newsom tells O'Keefe that while the Trump administration policies challenge his morals, "I want to stay and stick it out, so that way, when the time comes, I can undo whatever's been done [by the Trump administration]," video appears to show.
The alternative, he suggests in the video, is risking having someone who supports the administration take over his responsibilities.
When asked what specific policies he would seek to undo, Newsom appears to tell O'Keefe, whose disguise consisted of a blonde dye-job and a "Freddie Mercury" mustache, "I don't think there should be one specific prayer service."
The Pentagon's monthly voluntary worship services have ruffled feathers besides Newsom's in recent months.
Rachel Laser, the CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, complained in March, "Even if these prayer services are presented as voluntary, there is pressure on federal employees to attend in order to appease their bosses — especially since these services occur amidst the Trump administration’s campaign to punish anyone who doesn’t comply with its Christian Nationalist agenda."
Newsom, who expressed an openness to holding a prayer service where "all religions are recognized," is apparently keen also on doing away with the administration's schedule policy/career reform, which he told O'Keefe directly impacted him.
"I was converted to schedule policy, which means all of my protections as an employee have been stripped away," Newsom appears to say in the video. "Hopefully that's the first thing that gets undone."
Although he acknowledged that he lacked the authority to change policy, Newsom appears to tell the undercover reporter that he has "the influence."
In addition to apparently divulging his desire to see multiple MAGA policies reversed, Newsom appears to tell O'Keefe that rogue elements have already done their best to hinder implementation.
"There's a lot of things that they [the Trump administration] tried to do at the very beginning ... they've still not rolled out because you have certain folks in certain positions who can slow-roll things," Newsom appears to say in the footage.
Later in the video, O'Keefe's date appears not only to call Trump a "textbook narcissist" but claims that the Iran war is "completely stupid" and "based on one man's ego."
O'Keefe later tweeted, "Why do the gays in DC spill all the beans to me each and every single time?"
When asked for comment, the Pentagon referred Blaze News to the Navy, which did not immediately respond.
Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao did, however, address the undercover report on Wednesday evening, stating, "The Department of the Navy takes the conduct shown in this video extremely seriously."
"Such statements and apparent intent to leverage a position to undermine the policies and direction set by our elected leaders are inappropriate and incompatible with the standards expected of Department personnel," continued Cao. "Effective immediately, this individual has been placed on administrative leave while we determine next steps to ensure accountability and protect the integrity of our mission."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!The Pentagon has named two previously unidentified U.S. soldiers who were killed in an Iranian attack in Jordan late last week.
On Monday, the Department of War identified the fallen soldiers as 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, both of whom were killed during an enemy attack at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan.
'She gave the ultimate sacrifice for her country and will always be remembered as a hero.'
Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, who was killed in action on Friday, enlisted with the U.S. Army in 2025.
Gonzales was assigned to 1st Battalion, 57th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She served as a 14P Air and Missile Defense crew member, according to the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command Public Affairs press release.
“We are profoundly saddened by the loss of Pvt. Isabella Gonzales,” said Brig. Gen. Glenn Henke, commanding general of the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command. “She gave the ultimate sacrifice for her country and will always be remembered as a hero. Our hearts go out to her family, friends, and teammates. Our immediate priority is ensuring they have the resources and support they need to process this grief together.”
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1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, who died on Saturday, was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 55th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 32nd Army Air Missile Defense Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
"1st Lt. Feehan’s unwavering dedication to our mission, our values, and the air defenders he led will leave an enduring legacy,” Brig. Gen. John Dawber, 32nd AAMDC commanding general, said. “We stand fully committed to supporting his family and loved ones through this incredibly difficult time, and we will never forget his ultimate sacrifice in defense of our nation.”
Feehan will receive "the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Combat Action Badge, and be posthumously promoted to captain," according to a U.S. Army press release.
"Godspeed, heroes. Their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve," Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said on Saturday, following an initial CENTCOM announcement of the casualties.
The CENTCOM post added that four American service members were medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals and have since been discharged. Other personnel were evaluated for minor injuries and have since returned to duty.
CENTCOM also announced that "one service member is currently missing," in the same Saturday post.
The identity of the missing service member has not yet been confirmed, though a Central Command public release announced that U.S. military personnel found unidentified remains at the location on Sunday. The remains were being examined at the time of the release.
In the same release, CENTCOM announced a separate incident in northern Iraq that left one U.S. service member dead and another wounded during a "controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian one-way attack drone."
This brings the casualties over the weekend to at least three, with many more injuries being reported as well.
These announcements come at the end of more than a week of consecutive strikes against Iran as ceasefire negotiations continued to deteriorate. On Sunday, CENTCOM announced the conclusion of the ninth consecutive evening of strikes to "further diminish Iran's ability to attack commercial vessels and civilian mariners transiting the Strait of Hormuz."
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The liberal media didn't appear particularly fussed when, during the Biden administration, the U.S. Army announced that it would provide trans-identifying service members not only with elective genital mutilation surgeries but with hormone therapy.
When, however, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday both that troops ages 30 and older will undergo mandatory annual screenings for testosterone deficiency and that those with low levels will be offered voluntary testosterone replacement therapy as part of a new "High-T" initiative, liberal media personalities rushed to clutch their pearls.
'Is this a good idea?'
The liberal talking heads over at CNN — the network whose host Dana Bash admitted in 2024 of Democrats' appeal to men with lower testosterone — appeared especially shaken by the announcement.
"We owe our warriors the absolute best medical care in the world, and this program delivers on that obligation," Hegseth said in a video statement.
The war secretary added, "Taking care of your long-term health means ensuring you remain strong, resilient, and capable — not just for your next deployment, but for the rest of your life so you can thrive long after you take off the uniform."
According to the Pentagon, its new "enhanced screening protocol" is aimed at optimizing performance, combatting "operator syndrome," and maximizing mission readiness, and "complements the efforts outlined in the 'Warfighter Performance Optimization — Total Force Fitness' memorandum."
When pressed by CNN's Erin Burnett to comment on Wednesday about the policy, Rt. Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, suggested that testosterone is "not connected to the reality of the modern battlefield."
Burnett followed up by complaining that "it was really jarring just to hear that today, and obviously, you know, all the implications of it."
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CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins set the stage for Democratic Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) to similarly complain about the policy, which he said "seems sick."
"Somebody, please wake me up from this dystopian nightmare where we have such unserious people in some of the most important positions, not just in America, one of the most important positions globally," Booker said.
"This is ridiculous, and it should be mocked, and it's just another reason why we should remove him from office," he added.
John King, CNN's chief national correspondent, also concern-mongered about the policy, asking Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly (Ariz.), "Is this necessary? Is this a good idea? A bad idea?"
"It's a weird idea," Kelly said. "I mean, what have we seen from this secretary of defense so far? We see him run around on a stage talking about lethality and killing people. Now, he is talking about testosterone. This isn't what we need. What we need is better leadership."
NewsBusters highlighted that absent from CNN's coverage of the policy was any counterpoint.
In its coverage, the Washington Post similarly neglected to address any upsides of the policy, instead amplifying concerns from physicians such as Adriane Fugh-Berman of Georgetown University, who said that "this is non-evidence-based and could cause harm."
While across the Atlantic, there was some huffing and puffing over the policy at the Guardian, the BBC dared to print expert insight suggesting that testosterone screens and boosts might be beneficial.
Dr. Mohit Khera, a specialist in hormone replacement therapy and a professor of urology at Baylor College of Medicine, told the BBC that all men over 30 should undergo testosterone screenings, as it is a top marker of their current and future health.
"The key here is that many young men have low testosterone levels, which puts them at a disadvantage in terms of muscle mass, energy, and that could be an issue if you are in combat," Khera said.
Khera noted that while you have to be careful not to give someone testosterone unless "they do have some kind of symptoms," the benefits of hormone replacement therapy are increased muscle mass, decreased risk for depression, and decreased fatty deposits.
Admiral Brian Christine, assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has expressed his full support for the testosterone initiative, stating, "Optimizing testosterone supports strength, endurance, healthy body composition, cognitive performance, mission readiness, and overall well-being — ensuring America's fighting force is prepared to perform at its highest level."
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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced late last month that he would bundle the SAVE America Act with the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act so that Senate Republicans are presented with the choice of both bolstering the integrity of American elections and funding national defense — or neither.
"We're going to pass a MIRV, or what's better known as a 'merge onto the rule,'" said Johnson, adopting the military acronym for multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle, a ballistic missile that carries multiple warheads. "So what that means is, when Republicans vote for the rule, they'll be voting not just for the NDAA and everything else in there, but they'll be voting to merge onto that the SAVE America Act we passed back in February."
'WHATEVER IT TAKES.'
Johnson noted further that "if any Republicans choose to vote against the rule, they will be voting against that outcome. So we think this is another good way to show the resolve of the House."
House Republicans' resolve was tested and proven on Tuesday in a successful 215-211 vote in favor of a special rules resolution that included language that would attach the SAVE America Act (S.1383) to the end of the NDAA once it passes the House.
Florida Rep. Randy Fine was the lone Republican who voted against the rule.
Ahead of the vote, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) — who previously opposed the rule — noted on X, "We will try the MIRV process on the condition that Speaker Johnson attaches the SAVE America Act to all the appropriation bills and all must-pass bills here in the House and ensures it is sent to the Senate as one bill. If John Thune strips it out in the Senate that will be on him and the entire country should be watching what he does."
Luna said after the vote, "The House is doing its job, now it's the Senate's turn. All eyes on John Thune. If SAVE America fails all of America will know who to blame."
While Luna preemptively assigned the burden of the act's success to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), Democrats appear dead-set on blocking the linked NDAA, claiming their opposition has something to do with the protracted Iran conflict.
Although he too initially opposed the rule, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) suggested after its passage on Tuesday that it was worthwhile.
"That’s what we need," said Burchett, reported The Hill. "We need to just keep pounding the Senate and forcing them to take the right stand."
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) was among those enthusiastic over this turn of events, stating, "THANK YOU to House Republicans for delivering on their promises to the American people and setting a good example for us in the Senate."
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R) emphasized after the vote that with the midterm elections just a few months away, "we must try EVERYTHING we can to get the SAVE America Act passed. WHATEVER IT TAKES."
In addition to tethering the SAVE America Act to the 2027 NDAA, the rule advances other legislation, including a measure that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide and the State Department appropriations bill.
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The debate over autonomous weapons has started from the wrong premise.
Critics ask whether the United States should permit machines to kill. Advocates frame the question as whether we can afford to fall behind adversaries who will deploy such systems regardless. Both sides treat autonomous lethality as a novel moral category that demands a novel governing framework.
The United States will field autonomous systems regardless of whether the public debate reaches a satisfying resolution.
The U.S. military already possesses such a framework, however. It has been used for decades, it scales naturally to autonomous systems, and the public debate would improve considerably if both sides understood these realities.
The military governs the use of force through weapons control statuses, a graduated system that every air defense operator and ground commander knows by three commands. “Weapons hold” authorizes engagement only in self-defense or under specific order. “Weapons tight” authorizes engagement only against targets positively identified as hostile. “Weapons free” authorizes engagement against any target not positively identified as friendly.
A commander sets the status based on mission, threat, and environment, as units within his command may operate under different statuses depending on the situation. The framework already calibrates lethal authority to circumstance. It does not require a soldier to seek individual approval for every trigger pull, because the controlling judgment comes from the posture the commander has set rather than in each discrete engagement.
This structure maps directly onto the problem of autonomous weapons.
The objection that a machine cannot exercise the contextual judgment that distinguishes a combatant from a civilian, a threat from a bystander, has force only in environments where discrimination is genuinely difficult — precisely the condition the weapons control framework already addresses.
The Taiwan Strait and downtown Tehran are not the same operating environment, and no serious framework should govern them in the same way.
Consider the contrast. An autonomous system operating in the Taiwan Strait is tasked with engaging naval vessels in a declared conflict zone where civilian traffic is minimal. Every surface combatant of a certain signature is presumptively hostile and faces a discrimination problem that is nearly trivial. The environment is uncluttered, the targets are large and militarily unambiguous, and the consequences of restraint include the loss of American ships and sailors to adversary missiles that outpace any human operator’s reaction time.
A weapons-free or weapons-tight posture for autonomous engagement in that environment is defensible on the same grounds that justify those postures for human-operated air defense.
The same autonomous system operating in a dense urban environment such as downtown Tehran, where combatants and civilians occupy the same streets, should operate under weapons hold, which requires a human to authorize each engagement. The environment dictates the posture, and the framework already exists to make that determination.
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The Pentagon has, in fact, started to incorporate this framework into existing policy. Directive 3000.09, updated in January 2023, requires that autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. It also requires that the design of such systems confine each engagement to a time frame and geographic area consistent with commander and operator intentions.
The directive presupposes that the appropriate level of human control varies with the system and mission rather than holding constant across all cases.
What the directive does not yet do, and what the public debate has not yet grasped, is connect that variation to the weapons control vocabulary the force already uses, which would render the entire question legible to commanders, policymakers, and the public in terms the military has been employing for generations.
Adopting this approach requires trusting the military to set the posture, which is the crux of the matter for a public institution. The objection that the U.S. cannot trust commanders to calibrate autonomous lethal force responsibly proves too much.
We already trust those same commanders to calibrate human lethal force through an identical framework — one that, when commanders adopt the wrong posture, produces civilian casualties.
An autonomous system governed by the same logic inherits the same accountability structure, because the commander who sets a weapons-free posture for an autonomous system owns the consequences exactly as the commander who sets it for a battery of human-operated interceptors.
A public institution governing an autonomous force must establish this policy explicitly rather than allow it to emerge on a case-by-case basis from procurement decisions and after-action reviews.
The military should state as a matter of doctrine that autonomous weapon systems operate under weapons control statuses set by the responsible commander; that the status a commander may set for a given system depends on the discrimination difficulty of its operating environment; and that the most permissive postures remain available only in environments where the discrimination problem is genuinely simple.
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This codification would accomplish two things that the current ambiguous debate does not. First, it would give commanders a clear and familiar vocabulary for governing systems that would otherwise arrive without doctrinal handholds. Second, it would give the public a transparent standard by which to hold the institution accountable, because a weapons control status is a decision with a name and an owner rather than a diffuse property of an algorithm that no one can identify.
The alternative is not a world without autonomous weapons. Adversaries are building them, the technology is proliferating, and the United States will field autonomous systems regardless of whether the public debate reaches a satisfying resolution.
The alternative to adopting a clear framework is fielding these systems under an ambiguous one, in which the absence of explicit doctrine forces operators and engineers to improvise the hardest decisions in the moment rather than letting commanders govern them in advance within a system the nation has already validated across decades of use.
The military knows how to use lethal force. The framework is sound, familiar, and accountable. The task now is to apply it deliberately to new autonomous systems rather than assume that such systems require the country to invent its ethics of force from scratch.
Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at the American Mind.
The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday to consider the legality of its policy effectively barring trans-identifying individuals from serving in the military. In its petition, the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested the high court to determine whether the War Department’s rule that “generally disqualifies” those who have “gender dysphoria, a history […]
Securing 60 feet of federal dirt with the same trespassing law that protects Fort Bliss is not martial law.
President Trump signed a presidential memorandum on Thursday aimed at enhancing America’s depleted shipbuilding capacity. “The United States Navy has experienced a series of shipbuilding setbacks stemming from overly complex designs and iterative design change procedures, which have resulted in cost growth, delays, and cancellations. The lack of capacity and competition among shipbuilders has resulted […]
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