An update on how our Naval force in the Persian Gulf fighting Iran is holding up since last taking note back in April:
It's getting worse. (via Nicholas Slayton at Task and Purpose):
Sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are dealing with food shortages, moldy showers and poor morale, according to military family members concerned for their well-being. It’s the second time this year that an aircraft carrier on an extended deployment has seen poor conditions.
The poor situation on the Lincoln was reported this week by MS Now, citing conversations with a dozen family members of sailors and Marines on the ship, as well as recordings of meetings between family and Navy leadership. According to them, the crew onboard the aircraft carrier is worn out from the length of time at sea and long shifts as the carrier continues to take part in the war with Iran. Meanwhile, they are dealing with food shortages, long lines for meals, broken toilets and hygiene issues.
Roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines have been serving at sea aboard the Lincoln for nine months. The carrier spent 208 continuous days at sea, more than any other carrier in the modern era...
A lot of this is due to the extended deployment: My understanding from being in a Navy family is that these deployments should last six months, and the Lincoln has gone past that at nine months and counting. According to the report, the carrier has only been back to port in June, and obviously not long enough to undergo repairs and resupply.
Family members also expressed concern over how those conditions and operational pace could affect performance and lead to accidents on the ship. According to one of the military family members MS Now talked to, a Navy veteran himself, holes have been spotted on the carrier’s flight deck from wear.
In a statement to MS Now, a 5th Fleet spokesperson denied reports of holes on the flight deck and said that the Lincoln “remains fully capable of meeting all mission tasking...”
The Lincoln is the second carrier in recent months to suffer issues affecting sailors’ quality of life. The USS Gerald R. Ford sailed to the Middle East from the Caribbean, as part of a record-setting deployment that took it from participating in the January attack on Venezuela to Operation Epic Fury. During that deployment, the ship’s toilets kept failing, with sewage often overflowing and spilling onto the floor. During its time in the 5th Fleet area of operations, a fire broke out in the laundry room, causing enough damage that the Ford went to port for repairs.
This week, families of the sailors and Marines on the Lincoln met with Navy officials, including the acting secretary. MS Now, citing accounts of an in-person meeting and audio and video recordings of a virtual meeting, said that military families confronted Navy leadership over the matter Thursday night. During that meeting, per the recording, Navy leaders acknowledged issues with the ship’s toilets and said they are working to address shower concerns. They also admitted to a backlog of supplies of food and mail, saying that it was difficult to get supplies from Bahrain to the ship, due to the war.
This is where the fault is with the chain of command: The breakdown of basic logistics - our ability to get supplies to anywhere in the world as fast as possible - is all on a trumpian regime overseen by Secretary of Defense War Dumbass Hegseth that's more focused on gutting our armed forces leadership than on getting the job done.
What's striking now is how the report flags the phrase "low morale" in a way I honestly haven't seen since the unwelcome failures of Bush the Lesser's Iraq campaign as part of the post-9/11 response. By 2006, our occupation of Iraq had turned into a quagmire with glaring torture/human rights abuses and an ill-advised "stop-loss" deployment measure - due to the fact the U.S. went in with not enough troops in the first place - that kept too many frazzled troops on the front lines for years instead of months.
trump and Hegseth are making similar mistakes, augmented by their mutual failure to take war seriously enough to prepare better. trump can't comprehend how things work period, and Hegseth is too obsessed with a toxic world-view of manly "warrior" conduct to realize true military leadership requires patience, long-term thinking, an eye on detail, and genuinely making sure the lower ranks are supplied, trained, and treated better than mere cannon fodder.
What our government is telling our sailors and marines in the field of combat is that they're not important enough to get proper food or work in safe conditions to ensure their jobs get done. They're getting taught that they don't matter except to "obey" and "kill" on command.
It's the kind of thinking that destroys any respect our troops could have for their officers and government officials, that in turn creates a breakdown in command.
We're running the risk of turning the Iranian quagmire into something worse: An American remake of the British Navy's worst mutinies - I'm thinking Spithead and Nore, but there's been others - at a time our nation can't afford this kind of breakdown.
Knowing trump - and understanding the foolishness of Hegseth - they are going to double down on the beatings until the key to the storage locker is found and the strawberries thieves punished.
This is not going to end well.
Update 8/13: oh ye gods, the morale is so bad on the Lincoln that crews are literally jumping ship (via Natalie Oliverio with Military Times):
Annabelle Loma has spoken with her husband only a few times since he attempted to jump overboard from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln during his current deployment.
Communication has been difficult to come by, and he is now on medical hold.
Loma, who lives in San Diego, said her husband had been repeatedly overextended before he tried to jump from the carrier.
“He’s scared,” Loma said. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that. That’s not fair, that’s not right. That’s not what he should be worrying about right now...”
Separately, Stars and Stripes reported Tuesday that sailors described an incident in which watchstanders stopped a crew member from jumping overboard. Stripes reported that the crew was informed about the incident through a shipwide announcement...
The Navy did not provide a precise number of sailors who have attempted to go overboard or engaged in self-harm aboard Lincoln during the current deployment.
There's roughly 5,000 people on board a carrier that size. If you consider how one in five have serious depression/anxiety issues and how this crew is under serious stress, we might be talking about 1,000 people dealing with a lot of serious shit, especially as conditions on-board deteriorate. This is why you don't force extended service on people expecting just six months a rotation, especially in a war zone.
