Preparing to help defend Israel from attacks by Iran, the Houthi rebels, and the Lebanese Hezbollah, the U.S. Navy is deploying a large number of warships around the Middle East. The problem is that these deployments are incompatible with the effective deterrence of China.

The Chinese military is training for a range of wartime contingencies against the United States, including preemptive strikes. And with a shipbuilding capacity 200 times greater than that of the U.S. Navy, the Chinese navy is pumping out large numbers of capable warships including its exceptional Renhai class guided-missile cruisers.

China aims to deplete U.S. advantages in every domain of warfighting. While the U.S. retains an advantage in undersea warfare, for example, Russia is boosting China’s ability to destroy U.S. submarines. In the event of war over Taiwan, China would also have the industrial and geographic ability to repair warships at far greater speed than the U.S.

Underlined by his antics against Taiwan and the Philippines, a U.S. treaty defense ally, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s appetite for aggression is growing. Xi views the subjugation of Taiwan as a requirement of destiny both for himself and for the Chinese Communist Party.

The hard reality: The U.S. Navy’s combatant fleet is simply too small to effectively deter China and manage multiple international crises. While the Navy has 74 Arleigh-Burke class destroyers, it must balance them against maintenance schedules of various lengths. The same is true for the Navy’s aircraft carriers, attack submarines, and cruisers. It has previously been apparent with regard to the war in Ukraine, but the gap between Navy capability and missions is on the most stark display in the Middle East.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has now ordered the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group from the Pacific to the Middle East. The Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group is already in the Arabian Sea. This means that when the Abraham Lincoln departs Guam in the next few days, there will be no U.S. aircraft carriers in waters remotely proximate to China. The Philippines, facing highly aggressive Chinese efforts to dominate its exclusive economic zone, won’t have much American muscle on its doorstep. China may take notice.

But there will be a lot of U.S. warships around the Middle East.

Two destroyers operating under Naval Forces Europe, the USS Bulkeley and USS Roosevelt, a separate ship to the USS Theodore Roosevelt, are doing so off the Lebanese coast. The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and three supporting vessels are also off the Lebanese coast. Two destroyers, the USS Cole and USS Laboon, have suspended their escort duties with the Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group and moved to the Red Sea, improving their ability to intercept ballistic missiles launched from the Houthis in Yemen against Israel. The cruiser USS Lake Erie and destroyers USS John S. McCain, USS Halsey, and USS Daniel Inouye continue to escort Theodore Roosevelt. Also operating in the Arabian Sea are the Pacific Fleet destroyers USS Russell and USS Michael Mansoor.

These deployments reflect intelligence suggesting Iran and its proxies and partners are about to launch a multi-pronged attack on Israel. British air forces in Cyprus can complement some of the U.S. defensive measures for Israel, but the U.S. should take two additional steps to redress this crisis.

First, as Central Command’s Gen. Michael Kurilla has argued to Washington, the U.S. should take more aggressive action to degrade the Houthis’ missile and drone capabilities. Second, the U.S. must balance more effective deterrence of Iran with pressure on Israel to avoid steps that risk a second Lebanese civil war.

These choices are far from ideal. Again, however, the central problem is that the dilution of Navy power in the Pacific is incompatible with the deterrence of China. And while the Navy is attempting to bring more flexibility and greater readiness into its combatant fleet, its ability to do so remains structurally hamstrung by its size. The costs of keeping ships and crews at sea to cope with mission demands are high. Stars and Stripes noted the extreme toll that the Dwight Eisenhower carrier strike group’s recently concluded marathon 275-day deployment took on the ship and its crew. The Navy aims for carrier deployments of approximately 182 and 212 days.

Time is unlikely to be on America’s side as it grapples with China’s growing threat. That means bold, once-unthinkable actions are now necessary. Foreign allies such as Japan and South Korea must be paid to do what the Navy and its suppliers cannot do and build new warships for the U.S. on time and at cost. Here, the Navy must sacrifice ideal designs for designs that can work.

The need for such once-unthinkable action is real. As China was surging production of ships and capabilities designed to control the Taiwan Strait and hold U.S. aircraft carriers at long distances, the U.S. has blown tens of billions of dollars on misguided projects, such as two, soon three, Zumwalt class destroyers of highly questionable value and worse-than-useless Littoral Combat Ships.

That waste underlines another once-unthinkable requirement. Namely, that Congress must start putting national security before local cronyism. Politicians such as President Joe Biden and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) have gravely worsened matters here. But Republicans also share blame.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) and his colleagues deserve high praise from China, for example, for their recent defense bill statement that the “Committee is incensed that, despite repeated rejections by Congress, the Navy is once again proposing to decommission several Independence Class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) well before the end of their expected service lives. The Committee strongly believes that these ships, though not aligned with the Navy’s original plan, can provide operational value to the fleet in support of combatant commander requirements.”

The committee is very strongly wrong. The LCS vessels are underpowered, under-armed, expensive boondoggles that, were they ever employed in a war with China, would be useful only as coral reefs or at-sea graveyards.

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Top line: If China is the nation’s defining security challenge, the Navy cannot be expected to regularly maintain deployments of the scale underway in the Middle East absent other urgent changes.

The U.S. must put Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei back in his box — threatening to destroy his oil industry if he continues to threaten Israel and U.S. forces should do the trick — Israel must balance deterrence of Hezbollah alongside the avoidance of a regional conflagration, and the president, Congress, and the Pentagon must take whatever steps are necessary to get the Navy up to size.