Within the Nimitz class, Theodore Roosevelt has consistently been used as a first-responder hull rather than a routine rotational deployer. She was the sortie leader of Desert Storm, held station in the North Arabian Sea for 160 consecutive days after 11 September 2001, struck Iraq from the eastern Mediterranean in 2003, and closed out the F-14 Tomcat's operational career in 2006. The 2009-2013 refuelling overhaul and the 2015 shift of homeport from Norfolk to San Diego moved that experience permanently into the Pacific Fleet, where the ship has since been one of the more heavily tasked carriers in 7th Fleet.
The 2020 COVID-19 outbreak is the episode with the longest institutional shadow. What began as a medical problem — eventually 1,271 confirmed infections and one death aboard a crew of roughly 4,800 — became a civil-military dispute when Captain Brett Crozier's appeal for the crew's evacuation leaked, he was relieved on 2 April 2020, and Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly resigned within a week. Beyond the personnel outcome, the incident demonstrated that a single infectious outbreak can remove a nuclear carrier from the operational board for roughly two months, and it drove lasting changes in US Navy pre-deployment quarantine, shipboard medical surveillance and reporting practice. Assessments of who was right on the merits remain contested and should be treated as such.
Operationally the ship remains relevant but is late in its life cycle. The 278-day 2024 deployment — Indo-Pacific multi-carrier work with USS Carl Vinson and Japanese units in January, then a Middle East surge from July during the Red Sea and Iran-Israel crises — showed the Navy still using TR to cover two theatres in one cruise, at a visible cost in crew tempo and maintenance margin. Her designation in March 2026 as the first carrier with a fully deployable MQ-25-capable Unmanned Air Warfare Center points the other way: even with the Stingray's initial operational capability now pushed to 2029, the Navy is choosing to prove carrier-based unmanned aviation on an existing Nimitz hull rather than waiting for the Ford class, which gives this ship a role in a transition it will probably not serve long enough to complete.
