So much for the presidential candidate who claimed the desire to end “forever wars.” President Donald Trump’s administration has trapped itself in a Middle East quagmire with Iran. A conflict the president said would last only weeks will soon surpass six months as global energy prices continue to surge.
Results of Trump’s second-term adventurism, including the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and threats to invade Greenland and Cuba, have strained America’s armed services. But nowhere has this become a more acute crisis than the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran’s military has weaponized by choking the transit of about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies.
The Navy, in particular, is showing signs it is stretched too thin in this war.
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, now in the North Arabian Sea enforcing the maritime blockade against Iran, is the latest example. Democratic lawmakers in Congress have raised alarms the warship has been frequently short on food and supplies and suffered deteriorating conditions, including plumbing backups. Morale has hit rock bottom, they say; at least one sailor went overboard earlier this month, CNN reported, but was rescued.
The Lincoln has previously been homeported in Everett and Navy leaders say it may soon be headed to Bremerton. The warship departed San Diego in November of last year and has been deployed 270 days, including more than 200 without a port call.
Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, visited the ship recently and acknowledged some hardships.
“The crew is tired, but they continue to fire on all cylinders,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “History will record this deployment as one of the most operationally intense and consequential of the modern era.”
Trouble is, the deployments for carriers keep getting longer. In May, the USS Gerald Ford, the Navy’s newest carrier, finally returned home from a deployment that included plumbing problems and a laundry room fire that displaced 600 sailors from their berths. The Ford, which supported the mission leading to Maduro’s capture, pivoted to the Middle East as Trump opened his new and deeply unpopular war with Iran. Seven months at sea became 11, the longest deployment since the Vietnam War.
Questioning the Lincoln’s deployment, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said sailors’ struggles on board “raise a broader question: whether the Navy can sustain the operational tempo now being demanded of its carrier force, particularly as this administration repeatedly commits U.S. forces to conflicts of its own choosing and increasingly relies on aircraft carriers to sustain those operations,” he wrote in a letter to the Pentagon.
Although Trump has signaled support to boost American shipbuilding capacity and build out a bigger Navy fleet, those nascent plans do not give him the ability today to stretch the military so thin that cracks start to appear. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening. The depletion of air-defense missiles and other critical munitions now plague the Pentagon as it attempts to keep up with Trump’s demands.
Trump never seemed to possess an exit strategy for what now bedevils him in the Middle East. But exhausting the Navy and its service members is not an acceptable outcome, and could lead to accidents due to fatigue. The lower morale goes, the less Americans, not to mention their families, will be willing to serve the military.
The president, along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, owes answers particularly to sailors who endure ever-longer deployments: How will the administration balance those increasing months away from home with sufficient crew rest and refurbishment for the fleet? Solving this problem isn’t just the way to guarantee the military can respond to threats around the world. It’s a way to ensure the government does right by the men and women who choose to serve their country.
