Iran strike leaves U.S. Navy with a serious supply problem

The U.S. Navy is running open-ended combat deployments in the Middle East without access to most of its regional supply bases, forcing ships to resupply at sea roughly every five to six days rather than pulling into port, The New York Times reported.

Iran struck the Navy’s logistics hub in Bahrain on February 28, the first day of the current war, according to the Times. Other regional ports large enough to handle an aircraft carrier or a supply ship remain within range of Iranian missiles and drones, making them effectively off-limits.

With nearby bases unavailable, Navy supply ships now sail 2,200 miles to Diego Garcia, a small island in the Indian Ocean, to load food, fuel and other goods before returning to the fleet. The next-closest option is Singapore, 3,700 miles away, a route that requires passing through the Strait of Malacca, one of the world’s busiest commercial shipping corridors.

The Navy currently has about 20 ships and 20,000 sailors and Marines deployed in the Middle East, according to the Times. That includes two aircraft carriers, the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) and the USS George Washington (CVN 73), along with 12 destroyers carrying roughly 3,700 personnel combined, and a three-ship amphibious ready group carrying about 5,000 Marines and sailors. Keeping that force fed and fueled requires more than 420,000 meals and about 8 million gallons of fuel every week, the Times reported. A single carrier’s air wing alone burns roughly 2 million gallons of fuel weekly, even though the ship itself is nuclear-powered.

Resupply at sea requires the receiving ship and the supply ship to sail together on identical course and speed, often for hours, while staying within roughly 150 feet of each other despite wind, waves and current. Sailors fire lines across to the other vessel using rifles, then connect the ships with steel cables that carry fuel lines and pallets of supplies. Helicopters simultaneously ferry additional pallets of food, spare parts and mail between the ships in slung cargo nets.

These deployments have no fixed end date. Ships remain on station until the president and the defense secretary decide otherwise, according to the Times, a practice the newspaper described as unsustainable.

The Navy operates 11 aircraft carriers in total and has sent four of them to the Middle East during the war. Some of the remaining carriers are undergoing extended shipyard repairs and will not be available to deploy again for years, the Times reported.

One of those four carriers, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), spent most of its nine months at sea without a single port call, well beyond the roughly monthly port visits the Navy typically allows crews for rest. The USS George Washington relieved the Lincoln on August 20. The Lincoln docked in Thailand on Wednesday morning, where its crew will get several days of shore leave before the ship continues across the Pacific to its home port in San Diego.