Five thousand young Americans have been floating on the USS Abraham Lincoln since November. Nine months. No port call. No break. They set a modern Navy record for the longest stretch at sea without so much as stepping on solid ground, and not the kind of record anybody ought to be proud of.
Their families started sounding the alarm weeks ago. Wives and mothers telling reporters about text messages coming home with less and less hope in them. Photos of meals that amounted to a couple pieces of bacon and three or four chicken wings. Water contamination. Plumbing backing up. Mail lost for months. Sailors trying to jump overboard. You read that right. Young men and women in a war zone, eating scraps, and somebody in a uniform with stars on it called it “wartime austerity.”
Bless their hearts.
So the Navy finally sends the USS George Washington to relieve the Lincoln. Good. About time. Except the George Washington was supposed to be watching the western Pacific, where China happens to be doing its level best to remake the map. So now we’ve got no carrier near China and one in the Middle East babysitting the Strait of Hormuz because the Trump administration decided it could blockade Iran’s ports “indefinitely.” Indefinitely. That’s a word bureaucrats love because it means they don’t have to give you a plan or an end date. It just means however long they feel like it.
And what does the president of the United States say when a reporter asks him whether those sailors have been out there too long? “No, not nearly long enough.”
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class James R. Evans (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsNot nearly long enough. Five thousand kids eating chicken wings for dinner and he thinks they need more time out there. Pete Hegseth says the reports “completely misrepresented” the reality on the ship. Admiral Brad Cooper visited the Lincoln on August 15 and wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling the whole thing “old news” and saying the food and water problems were “resolved.” Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao said the crew “crushed their deployment.”
Well, I’m sure they did crush it. That’s what our people do. They show up and they do the job. That’s not the question. The question is why the people in charge treat them like pawns on a chessboard, to quote one sailor’s wife, and then pat themselves on the back for it.
Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Hegseth on August 12 laying out the whole sorry list: supply shortages, water contamination, plumbing issues, mental health decline, deck safety concerns, mail disruptions. The Pentagon’s response was to say it was all exaggerated and the real problem was the reporting.
I have questions for the manager.
When a sailor’s wife has to go to the press