The prolonged Iran war is stretching the U.S. carrier fleet and forcing Washington to pull critical naval power away from the Pacific at a dangerous moment, retired Navy Capt. Brent Sadler warned Sunday.

“The reality is we are operating in a world where we need 15 carrier strike groups – we only have 11,” Sadler told “The Sunday Briefing,” after the replacing the long-deployed USS Abraham Lincoln with the USS George Washington highlighted a deeper shortage of available carriers.

“We need to build more ships. That’s the simple solution – it’s the core problem – to deal with an increasingly dangerous world.

“It’s going to take time, but the world isn’t going to wait for us.”

Sadler also warned that moving the George Washington from the Pacific to support the Iran mission could send the wrong message to Beijing.

“When you take an aircraft carrier like the George Washington at the moment that the Chinese are at the peak of their most complex and aggressive military exercises in the Southern Theater Command in South China Sea, and you move it to a fight against Iran,” Sadler postulates, “it provides and sends a signal that we’re not going to be present.”