The US Navy Ran Itself Into the Ground, and the Next Crisis May Have No Carrier to Spare
Three years of high-intensity deployments in the Middle East burned through ships and people: for the next few years there may be only one carrier at sea at any given time, and adversaries are watching that gap.
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The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
The US Navy ran itself into the ground
Brian's judgment: over the past three years, from the Houthis to Iran to Israel and Iran, the US concentrated a fleet that had been dispersed globally into the Middle East, and nearly every ship that went to sea had its deployment extended. The result is equipment breaking and people breaking, and a great reset is now unavoidable — at any point in the next few years there may be only one carrier at sea, and the number of destroyers may be only half of normal deployment. So despite the current shipbuilding boom, in the near term the Navy is ‘down on one knee.’ This is not defeat; it is exhaustion from its own usage intensity.
— BrianWhat's broken isn't morale, it's generators and steam pipes
Drill down one layer and what is concretely broken is mechanical systems: the engine rooms of nuclear-powered carriers still use steam, with many moving parts that wear out; one destroyer was stranded in the South China Sea for several days after a generator failure and power loss. Maintenance can't keep up because the ships are at sea, and the less they're maintained the more easily they break. The human side is equally concrete: carrier flight operations are normally one shift a day (day or night), and it takes two carriers rotating to sustain continuous operations — which means flight deck crews work 12 hours a day for more than 200 days straight. The supply chain is broken too — there is no port to dock at in the Middle East, so cargo must first be shipped to Diego Garcia and then transferred to the ship, and what they end up eating is emergency rations.
— Brian‘They signed up for this’ doesn't hold up
Against the argument that ‘soldiers are supposed to endure hardship,’ the rebuttal on the show comes from firsthand experience: a first deployment originally set for six months was extended to nine months, twelve months, and finally fifteen months. The real damage isn't the hardship, it's being repeatedly told ‘you're going home soon’ and then repeatedly delayed. The harder point: some jobs on the ship have no backup, no third person trained in the same air traffic control role, so even if an immediate family member dies, the person cannot leave. This points directly at reenlistment rates — most of these carrier sailors are on five-year contracts, and after this deployment exactly half of them face the decision of whether to re-up.
They recruited people, but they can't get them through the training pipeline
The Navy struggled to recruit in recent years and only met its goal last year by lowering standards, but those it brought in can't pass the training school curriculum, so the gaps in the fleet remain — currently about 20,000 unfilled sea-duty billets. Retention is holding for now, but a large number are said to plan to ‘vote with their feet’ after this deployment. The show connects this to autonomy: the recruiting crisis, not how cool the technology is, is the real driver pushing toward an unmanned military.
Going back to steam catapults is a step backward
The president wants to cut the electromagnetic equipment on new carriers and go back to steam catapults and hydraulic elevators. Shashank concedes this isn't purely aesthetic: a decade ago EMALS really did have serious problems, delays and poor reliability, all documented in GAO reports. But a decade later things have changed — the Ford has accumulated about 35,000 electromagnetic catapult shots, with more than 12,000 in its most recent record-setting deployment, and the system is working normally. Going back to steam would mean redesigning the hull to lay steam piping, reconfiguring the internal structure, and losing the manpower the Ford saved by converting galley and other steam equipment to electric — equivalent to cramming 500 people back onto the ship and spending another 10 billion more. The next carrier, Doris Miller, could be delayed four years as a result, delivering close to 2040.
— ShashankThe maintenance backlog will eat surge capacity in a crisis
Every ship whose deployment was extended will need a longer-than-normal maintenance period once back in port, eight months to a year; and there is only one shipyard on each coast that can do carrier maintenance, so queues will pile up. The result is a repeat of the situation three or four years ago: only one carrier deployed for most of the year. What really matters is the crisis scenario — if something happens in the Taiwan Strait, these carriers may not have entered maintenance yet and will have to sail with faults: catapults down, arresting gear not working, elevator problems, fewer sorties and fewer aircraft embarked, escorts not at full mission capability, more easily hit, and getting hit digs the maintenance hole even deeper.
— BrianMunitions, shipbuilding and maintenance add up to a fragile window
Shashank pulls several threads together: not just redesigns and delayed production lines, but a catastrophic state of munitions stockpiles and a maintenance backlog, and together the US is entering a ‘perceived window of vulnerability.’ Five, six, seven years ago people were already discussing what the end of this decade would look like and which factors stacking up would make adversaries see the US as entering a weak period, and now those factors have been significantly amplified. He links this to John Ratcliffe going to Moscow: one possible reading is that Russian intelligence believes the US is unable to respond adequately to a European crisis — at least on missile defense, he doesn't think the Russians are entirely wrong.
— ShashankCyberwar may escalate from tactical to strategic
The show cites Michael Sulmeyer's argument: cyber operations have so far failed to deliver the ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’ that was expected. Former UK NCSC head Kieran Martin's formulation is that everyone thought Stuxnet was the future, but maybe it's more like the moon landing — a one-off, resource-intensive feat rather than a routine weekly operation. Cyber is very useful in joint operations (blacking out Caracas, helping disrupt Syrian air defenses), but on its own it is not enough to decide a war at acceptable cost. Sulmeyer thinks agentic AI will remove the main constraint — the ceiling on what a cyber operator can do. In the Hugging Face attack, the 1,200 agents were not themselves there for malicious activity; the malice was a byproduct, yet it was enough to swamp defenses.
— ShashankNo one dares call the offense-defense balance this time
Shashank says explicitly that he has no answer: in military affairs people argue endlessly over whether technology helps offense or defense, and drones initially looked offense-friendly (Nagorno-Karabakh), but 2022 to 2025 clearly shows that under current conditions defense has the advantage, making offensive maneuver harder. The cyber domain may be the opposite — if the most frontier models are opened only to a few privileged actors, defenders can also use agentic swarms to defend, patch and fix systems without being swamped, and then defense has the advantage. His conclusion: you have to see how these capabilities are fielded to judge, and the drone experience should make us wary of any confident prediction.
— ShashankIn their own words · checked verbatim
So we've taken our small Navy, we've worked it, ran it into the ground, and now it's going to be even smaller because everything's going to have to go in for maintenance.
Brian2:04
And when you're on these ships, there are jobs on these ships, roles on these ships where it would not matter if someone died in your immediate family. They would not be able to get you back home for a considerable amount of time because there is no backup.
And Brian will correct me, but 10 years on, stuff has changed, and the president hasn't.
Shashank11:16
we are entering a period of, I think, serious perceived vulnerability.
Shashank18:36
The scale of 1,200 agents who are not even there to conduct malicious activity, which is kind of a byproduct of their other goals, are able to swamp defenses and attack in this kind of, this way that can overwhelm defenders.
Shashank31:57
if you want to take out a power plant and you really want to take it out, dropping a bomb on it is significantly easier than engineering Baroque code to bypass an air gap system.
Shashank38:20
is this like a superficial stuff or is this something that is just showing us just how deep the rot is, just how difficult it is proving to scrape it out
Shashank43:35
Figures
| Ford cumulative EMALS catapult shots | about 35,000 | 11:16 |
| Ford catapult shots in most recent deployment | more than 12,000 | 11:16 |
| Additional crew needed to revert to steam catapults | about 500 | 12:22 |
| Delay for next carrier Doris Miller | about 4 years, delivering close to 2040 | 13:22 |
| Maintenance period after extended deployment | 8 months to 1 year | 15:30 |
| Navy unfilled sea-duty billets | about 20,000 | 8:16 |
| Number of agents in the Hugging Face attack | 1,200 | 31:57 |
| MicroDuck robot price | $400 | 28:54 |
| MicroDuck processor | Rockchip RK3566, from a Fujian manufacturer | 46:47 |
Glossary
- MRO
- The cycle and capacity problem of ships going into the yard for maintenance, repair and overhaul.
- CCA
- Unmanned combat aircraft designed to operate alongside crewed fighters.
- agentic AI
- AI that can plan autonomously and execute multi-step tasks in sequence.
- offense-defense balance
- An analytical framework for judging whether a given technology favors the attacker or the defender.
- air gap
- Physical network isolation that must be circumvented for a remote attack.
How to listen
Investors and researchers tracking US military readiness, Taiwan Strait and European defense scenarios, plus engineers making calls on AI safety and cyber offense-defense.
The last ten minutes or so of Rocket Force anti-corruption doggerel and book chat can be skipped.