Trump is burning out the Lincoln’s crew and baring the Pacific with no carrier.
The USS Abraham Lincoln passed her original May return date and kept sailing. The deployment has been extended past two hundred and sixty days to support an Iran war the administration has not named an end to. The Associated Press, citing analysts, reports the tempo has produced what one of them called sailors being “run ragged” — mental-health strain, supply strain, the slow compounding of a rotation that became an open-ended assignment.
The relief plan sends the USS George Washington west through the Malacca Strait to take the Lincoln’s place. Good news for the Lincoln’s crew. Bad news for the western Pacific, which now goes without a U.S. aircraft carrier. Possibly for months.
I have watched this before. From the shore side, in real time, I watched the military run its people into the ground while the political class demanded the deployments continue and the cable shows declared victory. From where I sat in the gunner’s seat in 2003 and 2004, I learned what extended tempo does to a unit. It runs families thin. It runs morale thin. It runs equipment thin. The Navy knows this. The Lincoln’s crew is living it.
Two hundred and sixty days is not an abstraction. It is two hundred and sixty mornings on a steel deck with no port. Two hundred and sixty days of family life happening somewhere else, by FaceTime. It is the missed birth. The two-year-old who was a newborn when the ship last saw a pier. The wife or husband who has been parenting alone since the previous Election Day. The kid’s first day of kindergarten by satellite call. The divorce paperwork someone is filing from a stateroom because the home front has already moved on without them. The sailors on the Lincoln are living what I watched my contemporaries live, only with more days of it.
The Navy knows the human cost. The contractors know the rest. Every extended deployment puts more ordnance on the ship’s deck, more parts through the requisition system, more maintenance intervals through the shipyards, and more money on the books of the Big Five defense primes (Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics) and the hundreds of subcontractors who supply them. The deployment tempo is a labor line for the sailors and a budget line for the bosses. The Lincoln’s crew is the labor. The defense contractors are the budget.
The class bias of the volunteer force runs underneath this. The political class’s children are not on 260-day deployments. The men and women on the Lincoln’s flight deck and in its engineering spaces are what the post-9/11 cohort has been from the beginning — working-class Americans whose families depend on them being home and whose service the political class treats as a budget line.
Greg Poling, who directs the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the AP what every Pacific capital already knows. Beijing, he said, “is quite happy with U.S. distraction, with the frustration of U.S. allies and partners.” The administration has said the Pacific is supposed to be the priority theater behind the Western Hemisphere. It is, in Poling’s words, “doing the exact opposite.” The carrier movement shifts U.S. naval attention from the Pacific toward the Middle East as military operations against Iran continue. Two theaters, two oceans, two pivots away from the Indo-Pacific the administration says is the priority. The math for the Pacific does not improve.
Poling said Pacific allies are unsettled by the unpredictability of this administration. The word “unpredictability” is doing a lot of work. What allies actually mean is that they cannot plan around Washington. They cannot tell whether the United States will be where it has said it will be, on the schedule it has said it will be on, with the forces it has said it will have there. The alliance system the United States built in the Pacific after 1945 ran on the premise that American forces would be where they were said to be, when they were said to be there. When a carrier leaves the Pacific because the Middle East needs it, the premise takes a hit Beijing can exploit and allies cannot ignore.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” He was not warning against defense. He was warning against the moment when the machine begins to run on its own logic, when the deployment tempo and the operational appetite grow faster than any political objective can keep up with. That moment is the Lincoln at two hundred and sixty days. The moment is a Pacific without a carrier. The moment is an Iran war the administration will not name the end of. The remedy is the one Eisenhower asked for: an alert and knowledgeable citizenry asking the political class to name the political objective and put the machine behind it.
The cold ledger: the Lincoln at two hundred and sixty days at sea. The Pacific without an American carrier for months. Beijing reading the schedule and adjusting. Pacific allies reading the schedule and adjusting. Sailors reading the schedule and enduring. Somewhere in the Pentagon, a contractor is reading the same schedule and calculating the next maintenance-cycle invoice. The administration chose the war. The administration has not chosen what comes after. The sailors and their families are paying the difference in the meantime.