The USS Theodore Roosevelt hasn’t even left San Diego yet, and the Navy is already packing her differently.

More ship-store goods. More supplies. More spare parts. More of the ordinary stuff that doesn’t make recruiting commercials but becomes mighty important when 5,000 sailors are stuck aboard a floating airfield thousands of miles from the nearest Walmart.

Coffee. Soap. Toothpaste. Energy drinks.

And parts. Lots of parts.

There is a reason.

The Navy learned a few things from the USS Abraham Lincoln.

And the Lincoln learned them the hard way.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle told reporters this week that the Navy is preparing Theodore Roosevelt and her strike group for an extended deployment as the war with Iran continues. Families are being told to plan for about eight months.

That’s worth lingering over.

The carrier hasn’t deployed and already the Navy is planning for the extension.

For years, the Navy’s preferred carrier deployment was around seven months. Then came eight months. Nine months. Ten months. Extensions arrived a few weeks at a time while sailors and families tried to figure out whether birthdays, anniversaries and holidays were going to come and go without them.

Now the Navy is cutting out some of the suspense.

Pack for eight months.

Maybe longer.

Welcome to the new normal.

The Lincoln Lesson

The Abraham Lincoln has been out there for more than eight months without a real port call while conducting combat operations.

And somewhere along the way, the little things started disappearing.

Not bombs.

Not jet fuel.

Toothpaste.

Soap.

Coffee and energy drinks.

Ship-store merchandise.

The Navy kept the important stuff moving. Sailors were fed. Aircraft flew. The carrier fought.

But there is only so much room aboard a ship, and when replenishment becomes difficult, priorities become brutally simple.

Food beats toothpaste.

Aviation parts beat energy drinks.

A missile beats just about everything.

Caudle acknowledged the problem.

“It’s a fair critique that there were some puts and takes at the beginning of Epic Fury until we got [resupply] dialed in,” he said.

That’s Pentagon English for: Yeah, we had a problem.

And the problem was bigger than a missing case of deodorant.

The Navy was learning how to sustain a carrier strike group in a war where the old logistics assumptions no longer applied.

The Long Road to the Carrier

Aircraft carriers don’t operate alone.

That nuclear reactor means the carrier doesn’t need an oiler to keep its propulsion plant running. It does not mean the strike group has magically escaped the laws of logistics.

The destroyers alongside it burn fuel.

The carrier’s aircraft burn enormous quantities of jet fuel.

Everybody eats.

Aircraft break.

Radar systems break.

Pumps break.

Electronics break.

Things aboard ships have an irritating habit of breaking at precisely the moment you need them most.

And ammunition, contrary to Hollywood, doesn’t regenerate in the magazine after the credits roll.

All of that has to come from somewhere.

During Epic Fury, the Navy had to establish a logistics network stretching far beyond the carrier’s operating area.

Combat logistics ships were coming from Diego Garcia. Parts were flowing from Singapore, Japan, the Philippines and the United States.

Think about that geography for a moment.

A part manufactured or stored in the United States may cross an ocean, move through another Navy facility, get transferred again, fly or sail across thousands more miles and finally reach a carrier operating in the Arabian Sea.

Caudle has a wonderful Navy phrase for the system that eventually emerged:

The “combat logistics force treadmill.”

That’s exactly what it is.

Oilers. Supply ships. Cargo aircraft. Helicopters. Warehouses. Sailors. Contractors. Parts clerks. Forklifts.

Round and round they go.

The glamorous photograph is the F/A-18 launching from the flight deck.

Nobody puts the forklift driver moving pallets at Diego Garcia on the recruiting poster.

But without that forklift, eventually the F/A-18 doesn’t launch.

Wars run on logistics.

They always have.

You Can’t Replenish a Sailor at Sea

The Navy eventually figured out how to keep the Lincoln supplied.

There’s another problem it hasn’t solved.

The sailors can’t be replenished by helicopter.

The Navy can send over mail, food, parts and toothpaste. It cannot sling-load three days in a hotel, a cold beer, a restaurant meal, and the chance to walk down a street where the deck isn’t moving underneath you.

Caudle made an interesting comparison between the extraordinarily long deployment of USS Gerald R. Ford and what happened aboard Lincoln.

Ford was gone 326 days, but its sailors got port calls.

Lincoln went roughly eight and a half months without one.

The difference mattered.

So now the Navy is looking for places where carriers operating in the Arabian Sea might actually send sailors ashore.

Africa.

Kenya has been mentioned.

India.

Diego Garcia.

Possibly Singapore.

None is exactly around the corner.

Which produces another marvelous bit of Navy terminology from Caudle: The “transit tax.”

Translation: Liberty isn’t free.

Every mile a carrier sails away from its combat station is a mile it eventually has to sail back.

The escorts go with it.

Those destroyers need fuel.

The transit takes time.

And while the carrier is steaming toward a liberty port, it isn’t sitting where the combatant commander wanted it.

There is no magic solution here.

Keep the carrier on station and grind down the crew.

Send the crew to liberty and give up some combat availability.

Pick one.

Enter George Washington

The Navy is now operating a carrier relay.

Abraham Lincoln stayed.

And stayed.

And stayed some more.

Then USS George Washington arrived in the CENTCOM area to begin taking over.

Next up appears to be Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt and her escorts are expected to leave San Diego in the coming weeks and ultimately head toward CENTCOM.

And this time the Navy knows what may be waiting.

That’s why they’re packing more aboard before the lines ever come off the pier.

The Navy is also preparing the families.

Eight months.

That may be the most significant development of all.

The Lincoln extension was something that happened.

The Roosevelt extension is something they’re planning for.

There’s a big difference.

Meanwhile, There’s China

And here’s where this stops being a story about toothpaste.

While the Navy feeds carrier strike groups into the Middle East, its own Chief of Naval Operations says the Pacific requires more naval force simply because of its enormous geography.

He’s right.

The Pacific is one hell of a big ocean.

China knows it.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy isn’t getting smaller while American carriers steam west toward the Arabian Sea.

China is building ships, operating farther into the Pacific, and expanding the reach of a military designed largely around making life miserable for American forces trying to operate anywhere near the Chinese mainland.

Yet another Pacific carrier is preparing to head toward the Middle East.

Therein lies the problem.

The Navy can move carriers.

It cannot manufacture another carrier strike group because somebody at CENTCOM wants one.

A carrier comes with an air wing, destroyers, submarines, logistics ships and thousands upon thousands of sailors.

And every month spent on an extended deployment is borrowed from somewhere else.

Maintenance gets pushed.

Training cycles move.

Families wait.

Ships accumulate wear.

The next deployment gets closer to the last one.

Eventually somebody has to pay the bill.

The Warning

Give the crew of the Abraham Lincoln a lot of credit.

They kept flying.

They kept the ship operating.

They kept fighting while their deployment stretched toward the better part of a year, replenishment became harder and liberty disappeared over the horizon.

They did what sailors have always done.

They made it work.

But “the crew made it work” is not a strategy.

It is what sailors do when strategy hands them the bill.

Now the Navy is applying the lessons aboard Theodore Roosevelt.

More supplies.

More spare parts.

More ship-store goods.

Better logistics.

More realistic expectations for families.

Maybe some distant port calls if the operational situation permits.

All sensible.

But you can’t pack the answer to the larger problem aboard Roosevelt before she leaves San Diego.

America has a finite number of aircraft carriers.

A finite number of escorts.

A finite logistics fleet.

And, most importantly, a finite number of sailors.

The Abraham Lincoln proved the United States Navy can keep an aircraft carrier fighting for a very long time.

Theodore Roosevelt is now being packed on the assumption that she may have to do that, too.

Meanwhile, the Navy says it needs more force in the Pacific.

Iran hasn’t solved America’s carrier problem.

It has exposed it.

The question isn’t whether the Navy can keep the carrier treadmill running.

The question is how long it can keep running before somebody or something falls off.