What Went Wrong on the U.S.S. Lincoln?

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Hi, it's Rachel Abrams. I'm one of the hosts of the Daily. It's very nice to meet you. Yeah, hi, it's nice to meet you too. From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is the Daily. In recent weeks, family members of Sailors have been raising alarms about the conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. This is a much longer deployment than it was supposed to be. They're gone so much longer than they were supposed to be gone.

And it's hard. There are 5,000 service members on the ship. And they've been at sea for nearly nine months straight without stepping foot on land. I'm constantly getting used to it. When's your husband coming home? You just have to say, "Oh, well, we're thinking too.

No, we think too high. I always think August, but we don't really know yet, so just keep us in your prayers."

I spoke with the wife of one of those sailors. She said this isn't her husband's first deployment, but it has been the toughest. I really cannot imagine being stuck in a floating box door. You know, however many I can't even... I don't even know if the day count is now, but, you know, for 200 plus days for 24 hours. She said she's concerned about the conditions on the ship, and whether her husband is getting enough food. He sends me a picture of his meal, and I'm thinking, "Oh, my goodness. On his plate, there was a few slices of bacon that did not look to cook."

And, like, chicken wings, like a couple inches tall ones, and that was it.

“When he sent you that picture of food, what was your first thought?”

Oh, like, are you hungry? This is not okay. We're expecting people to fight for our country, and yet we're not giving them a full meal. That blows my mind. She said she'd lost contact with her husband, sometimes for weeks at a time. As she watched reports on the news, that American sailors were coming under attack. She didn't know how he was doing, and his return date kept getting pushed later and later.

I can just, like, read his tone or the text, and he's just gotten more and more, like, exhausted. So I just worry about him, and a lot of other people mentally. I'm not expecting the conditions for them to be in to be summer camp. They are in the middle of the ocean, and they are surrounded by not America. Nobody enters his life, expecting it to be fun.

This is a whole other level of bad. Today, my colleague John Ismay explains what went wrong on the USS Lincoln. How it could impact the US military's warfighting capability.

“And what kind of toll it's taken on the men and women in uniform?”

Yes, we kind of knew what we were getting into, but this is way harder than when it should be. It's Tuesday, August 18th. John Ismay, welcome to the Daily. Thanks for having me. So John, you are a former Navy man, if I'm not mistaken.

And we just heard from the wife of a service member aboard the USS Lincoln. And I want to talk about sort of what the conditions on this ship have been like, and how they fit more broadly into what the military is experiencing right now. But I want to just start with your understanding some of the issues here.

John, tell us, when did you first start hearing that there were issues with the conditions on board the ship?

Yeah, sure.

“So I think it was about a few weeks ago.”

I started to see indications on social media websites or outlets that cover military news. And at first, they were issues that we've heard about from other deployments, such as, you know, morale taking hit, because they've been extended, trouble getting mail, trouble getting enough food. And I've gotten some photos of meals that people who taken from onboard the ship and then sent to their family. One was a photo of what breakfast was like from most of this deployment.

And it was sort of one square of a waffle and two sausage patties. Then there was another photo showing what a meal was like when CNN had a reporter and a camera crew aboard recently, then there were eggs and there were vegetables. There was a whole bunch of food.

And it was back to pretty meager rations.

So, you know, food issues aside, they were more serious allegations. We got reports or we heard reports that a sailor had tried to jump overboard from the Lincoln.

“Well, now we haven't confirmed that, so we haven't published that, right?”

When the mental health concerns became public, that's when the story really started getting traction on the national news cycle. What's happened here is in many ways a betrayal of trust by the Pentagon stopped leaders because they have failed to provide what the sailors on that ship need to avoid hardship.

And you had democratic lawmakers starting to speak out publicly.

And certainly the president has shown that he just doesn't really care about the troops. His lactosecule attitude about men and women in their deployments, you know, just kind of reflects what he actually thinks about. And things have been more as toys, not the fact that they truly didn't dare humans. And then, Pete Heggseth comes out and denies everything on the record. I completely misrepresented.

Listen, we make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them in every single moment. Saying, essentially, there are no problems. And then today, you've got President Trump. You're a loud boisterous person. Your fate is being wiped out. Who last out and a reporter who asks questions.

“Mr. President, is there a food off the USS Lincoln?”

Yeah, and it was a, and it was a CNN fake report. And then said, essentially, that all criticism of what he's doing is fake news. I was at a group meeting and an admiral came up to see me over the weekend. And it was at a big group and he happened to be an admiral retired. He said, I've been on ships and they're out there much longer than that, sir. And I know people on the Lincoln, they say it's beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of.

Despite everything from the White House, what my reporting showed is that there are much larger problems affecting the ship. Let's talk about the details of this, John. There's been a lot of talk about the length of this deployment of this particular ship. I think we're going on about nine months right now. Explain to us what is unusual about that in this case and why people are focusing so much on that?

Yeah, absolutely. So in peacetime, a, you know, deployment for a worship was generally about six months. Cures would often stretch out to seven months, maybe a little later after the 9/11 attacks, deployments of eight months, even nine months became fairly routine. Because there are only so many aircraft carriers the Navy has. What is different here is that the Lincoln having deployed on November 21st was expected to get back to San Diego in May. And they've been extended. I think twice at this point, and they do not have any date for when they're going to leave the Middle East or when they're going to get home.

And so as we're here talking today, the USS Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for 270 days without any sort of break for her crew, any Liberty port. Liberty port, meaning where the service members can get off the ship and get some kind of a break. That's right. And the comparable idea is really just imagine doing your job for like almost a year without being able to take any weekends off. And oh, by the way, you can't leave your office or the floor floor. A carrier of this type is big. It's as long a little bit longer than the Chrysler building is tall and a little bit less than the Empire State Building. It's basically a series of interconnected windowless metal boxes.

That's the easiest way to describe it.

“Sometimes to go from one compartment to another, you have to open a watertight door and then close it behind you to seal it off just to get from point A to B. You may have to walk through the hangar deck.”

You may have to walk through walk past all sorts of machinery spaces. It's often very loud.

You know, I had hearing loss for a while after my first tour and you're sleeping there. You're with the same few dozen people that you see every day that you work with.

You don't have much privacy and working days typically go longer than 12 hours. You know, 16, 18 hour days are not uncommon. And some jobs are sort of the worst conditions are what we call port and starboard watch where your on for six offers six on for six offers six. And during that time off, you're balancing sleep and any semblance of relaxation or self care with all of your other duties on the ship that you have to do.

And almost like a psychological experiment when you throw in the lack of sleep and you are saying that people on the Lincoln they have been doing this for the better part of a year.

“How unusual is that John? How should we be thinking about that in the context of previous military deployments?”

I mean, there was one carrier just this year that came back to Norfolk after like 11 months at sea. And it broke a record for the longest carried deployments since the Vietnam War. But a really important thing to know is that even for the aircraft carriers that were off the coast of Vietnam all those years ago. Every month or two months, they would generally head east to Subic Bay in the Philippines, where the US Navy had a massive base and the ship could refit, reload, food, water, ammunition, everything it needed.

And these people aren't getting it. And I think even for a really good crew, a well-trained crew, it's the length of time that becomes a factor because some people can become complacent when they do the same thing.

Over and over again, lack of sleep has been shown to, I think it was being awake for 24 hours is like having a point one blood alcohol content.

And fatigue creates safety problems. These sailors are working around heavy equipment and machinery that a lot of which, if you're not careful, you will die. You know, if you're on the, you can't go on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier at night without some special training on where to stand. I mean, if an arresting cable snaps, that can cut people on half, literally, you know, take off their legs. Deaths on these deployments are not unheard of. And so chronic fatigue is what gets people hurt or worse.

So from what you're saying, it actually sounds like there may be two buckets of issues. Like, there are, are the issues that are coming from this ongoing fatigue from this extended deployment that are safety related. But also, the ship just can't restock the way that it normally would. That's right. Now, for warships at sea, they are able to do what's called an underway replenishment. There is usually a supply ship that accompanies a carrier strike group. And that supply ship would be able to give you fuel for your jets and your helicopters and give you food.

You may be doing that about every three days, but generally speaking, you know, three weeks into being at sea. Vegetables disappear. You know, that means salads. That means, you know, things to have with lunch and dinner. And you're pretty much eating out of cans and bagged food. So if you ever get fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, it can actually be a huge morale boost just because you haven't had these things for so long. You're mentioning, after two or three weeks, you ran out of fruits and vegetables. And just to remind of where they were talking about nine months here.

Yeah, have you ever eaten dehydrated eggs?

“Yeah, well, I mean, in the Navy, nobody's expecting a gourmet meal. For my experience, I always felt that quantity equals quality, right?”

Like as long as you have enough to eat, that's kind of it. Hot sauce goes a long way and making things taste better. But based on the photos that I'm getting from family members of crew members on the Lincoln, the food appears to be rationed. It doesn't appear that you know, plates are very full. That actually leads me to my next question, John, because I think that any military family would say, like, look, we expect a certain amount of hardship here.

The wife of the service member that we spoke to for this conversation that I'm having with you, she makes this very clear. But can you explain to people that might be unfamiliar with this kind of service? What is the difference between the hardship that these families know to expect? And what is actually happening now? Yeah, well, I think that there are certain hardships that sailors definitely are expecting long separations from home. Living conditions not what you would prefer, right?

There's a difference between that and having an open-ended commitment that starts to feel like it breaks faith with those sailors.

“Because there needs to be some sort of trust with leaders that, hey, when we say we're going to be gone this length of time, that that's what happens, right?”

So, I mean, I guess when it comes down to it, there is a difference between regular hardship and borderline abuse.

So, I mean, I think that for the services, for the Navy, for US Central Command, and for the Secretary of Defense to basically be saying, warrior ethos, war is hell, all those things.

What did you learn about what is driving all of these issues? Like, I think people might just assume maybe that the Lincoln has undergone all this hardship just because of the fighting with Iran?

“Well, there's a saying that logistics is king, and that is the heart of this problem is logistics.”

What I learned, having deployed to that region multiple times, was not only shocking because our own government hasn't been forthcoming or totally honest about this, but it has implications not only for life aboard the Lincoln, the quality of life for the crew, but major implications for the United States ability to operate militarily in that region period. We'll be right back. I'm Jonathan Knight, and I'm the general manager of New York Times Games. If you play our games, you probably know there's something a bit different about them.

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“So, John, from your reporting, what have you learned about what has actually led to these conditions on the Lincoln that we've been hearing about?”

It really comes down to one thing, which is logistics. And right now, the Navy has kind of talked about some logistical difficulties in the region, but what really happened is that the Navy's base in Manama, Bahrain, was destroyed by Iran.

Starting on the first day of the war.

And explain why that base matters here. So, the name of the base is Naval Support Activity Bahrain. It's a logistics hub. They're people going to and from the ships in the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Man would come to Bahrain first and get on a helicopter or something else to get to one of these ships. Food, all sorts of things comes through the mail, all comes through Bahrain and then is sent to the ship. And a supply ship trying to maintain a strike group in the Gulf of Man might take a day maybe two days to get to Bahrain and then time to unload and get back.

But right now, what I was told is that Bahrain is gone. And I was like, what do you mean gone? They're like, not there. Bye-bye gone. Right. Like destroy. Like destroyed. Yeah, I was told that there's a basically a skeleton crew of Navy personnel there and that everyone else who works at the base was evacuated to Tampa, Florida. And that's where Central Command headquarters is. And so that means that your logistics train is much much much much longer. So instead of maybe being a hundred miles, it's now 2,200 miles because the next closest base that is not within range of Iranian weapons is a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia.

And it would take more than five days, just to get from the Gulf of Oman where those two carrier strike groups and all the destroyers are to do Garcia. And then you obviously have to factor in time to load and offload things and then another five plus days to get back out there. So basically the USS Lincoln other ships they had been relying on this port in Bahrain, that got destroyed, which means that the next closest is a port that is so far away that it's coming up the supply chain works, but just to ask a really maybe a dumb question John.

Surely these two ports are not the only places that have stuff that a ship might need, for example, like I don't know fresh eggs or whatever, so why can't this ship dock anywhere else to pick up some of the supplies that the sailors are missing.

The answer is really simple, any ports in the region that could handle a ship to size of an aircraft carrier is also well within the range of Iranian missiles and drones.

You need tugboats, you need a harbor pilot. So if a ship like the Lincoln was moored in a port, say Fujira, and satellites, whatever detected missiles coming their way from Iran, it would take hours and hours to get the ship underway and back out to see, meaning the ship would still be there when the missiles would hit.

So there are no ports that are safe enough to send a capital ship like an aircraft carrier and not have it taken out a commission.

This sounds like, as you mentioned, a real logistical nightmare in a conflict where logistics are kind of everything, as you explained, if the only port is five days away, as it is in this case, what if a knockdown affects of that for the Lincoln specifically? So when a ship is out to see as long as the Lincoln has without a port call, it means there's just a lot of maintenance you can't get done.

“That you need to do to keep everything working the way it has to to accomplish the mission, meaning what kind of shape are the engines in, you know, or in the case of the carrier, you know, it's nuclear reactors and all the associated equipment.”

But on the flight deck, there is this coating we called non-skid. It's basically a rippled asphalt that goes up on the deck to make sure that people and planes and helicopters don't slide around.

So the problem is that after thousands of aircraft sorties take off landings, taxing on the flight deck, that coating that provides friction starts to break down, starts to chip off, and then it becomes a real safety hazard. The best place to make repairs for things like that is import. So when you start keeping a ship out like the Abraham Lincoln out for nine months or longer, it's going to necessarily be in worse shape than it would if it came back at six months. And that's going to take your maintenance usually in a shipyard that can take months. And aircraft carriers are a limited resource right now the Navy only has 11 of them. And it's going to go down to 10 next year when one aircraft carrier is decommissioned.

But there's another one that is replacing the fuel rods in the nuclear reactor that takes years. You have another carrier that's about to be refueled. You have another one up in Washington that's in a shipyard. So there aren't that many of these things to go around.

“And what are we supposed to extrapolate from that John? Like what is the bigger impact on the military from these carriers being out of commission?”

We only have 11 carriers and you're burning through the fourth one right now. You do that long enough and you run out of carriers to use. One thing I don't think we've talked about yet is that the Navy keeps an aircraft carrier forward deployed in your coast good Japan in the US 7th fleet.

The ship is basically their in case of emergency break glass. Do you send the carrier from your coasts to the outside of the 7th fleet? And that's exactly what's happening right now.

The USS George Washington is the Japan base carrier. And that ship is being sent to relieve the Lincoln right now. It might still be a weaker more for the ship to get there. But that creates what you call an opportunity cost. If the George Washington is not the South China Sea as a deterrent for North Korea and China, you're basically out of luck. We'd have to spin up anything that's available in San Diego to try and get out there as fast as you can. But having ridden a carrier from San Diego to your coast. That took us a month.

And that was when we were ready. So the George Washington going to the Middle East means that there's a gap in the Pacific that is not easily filled. We just months into this war with Iran. The US Navy is essentially using its break glass emergency plan. That's right. You know, in soccer terms, it's like pulling the goalie, right?

“And that's what the carrier in Japan has always been. And right now, that carrier is heading to the Middle East and leaves the South China Sea all of the Western Pacific without a carrier ready to go.”

This is feeling a little bit like a zero sum game and maybe if you paid into the military, you've known that the whole time. But I can't help but think about the issues that we went to a war over to begin with, like Iran's nuclear program, for instance, and how that has been a longstanding issue for multiple presidential administrations. And what you are describing, the strain that we are seeing on the resources, this zero sum game, if you will, I can't help but wonder whether or not that very thing that very issue intention is perhaps one of the reasons that previous administrations dealing with the same persistent problems of the Iran didn't go to war to begin with earlier, like in other words, how predictable was all of this.

You know, they have mines, they have missiles, all of that. And they've also assumed that Iran would target American logistics in the area.

And Bahrain would be expected to be wiped out on day one. And that's exactly what happened. Iran closed the Strait on day one. So, really only if you launched this war with just supreme overconfidence and belief that everything is going to work, do you launch that war without an alternative to say the basin Bahrain, where you could resupply ships. The fact that they're moving things in and out due Garcia, to me, speaks to a real failure of planning. We have heard in recent days from the administration that help us on the way for these sailors on the USS Lincoln.

“What do we know about when that will happen and how likely it will be that it works according to plan?”

Yeah, so the ship that's coming to relieve the Abraham Lincoln is the USS George Washington, right? Mid last week we understood that the GW was going through the Strait of Malacca in Indonesian waters. We likely would take a week maybe longer to get there, you know, just quick back at the envelope kind of math. It's likely that journey is about 3,000 miles. It's probably going to take a week or more for the George Washington to get there. People who have family members on the Abraham Lincoln, their sailors are telling them we don't even want a port call right now. Like screw it, we just want to get home. We don't want you to try and throw us a bone, like a constellation prize of going to Thailand or someone else, just plot a course for San Diego and let's get out of here and get home as fast as we can.

One of the failures I talked to you, their child on the ship hopes to be back for Halloween, maybe to dress up in a costume and hand out candy to kids, basically two months from now, which would mean the ship would have been out for a year.

But these sailors still, as far as we know, haven't been given a date when they can expect to be back home.

We'll be right back.

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