Following revelations from families about some U.S. service members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln struggling with mental health after 250 days without a port visit, sailors, retirees and lawmakers told Military Times that troops were absorbing consequences of longtime flaws within the sea service that have been worsened by the current conflict. The Navy has struggled for years to meet high operational tempo demands, they said. Deployments are regularly extended, scheduled maintenance is missed and the shipbuilding pace remains glacial, leading to delays in delivery and an undersized fleet. The issues have spanned multiple presidential administrations but have been compounded by the handling of the Iran war and ensuing military operations, sources said, leading to dire circumstances for some sailors. Leaders have disputed the descriptions of deteriorating conditions aboard the Lincoln and denied reporting about quality-of-life concerns. Asked recently by reporters about families’ concerns over the length of the deployment, President Donald Trump dismissed the question, saying that it’s “not nearly long enough.” Asked about those same concerns, Adm. Daryl Caudle, the service’s chief of naval operations, told Military Times, “Sailors first is not a slogan — it’s a warfighting imperative.” “The sustained pace of operations in the Middle East has only reinforced that taking care of our sailors and maintaining combat readiness are inseparable,” Caudle said.

‘We need more ships’

Following outcry about conditions aboard the Lincoln, the Navy moved the Nimitz-class carrier USS George Washington from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East, where it arrived Wednesday. The ship is reportedly replacing the Lincoln, which will now steam toward its homeport of San Diego. The move temporarily leaves the western Pacific without a U.S. aircraft carrier, the presence of which is a key part of the U.S. military’s effort to deter China in the South China Sea and reassure regional allies. Operational tempo concerns, meanwhile, are nothing new for the service, according to retired Vice Adm. Fozzie Miller, who served as commander of U.S. Fifth Fleet and U.S. Central Command from 2012 to 2015. Miller joined the Navy in 1979. From his early days in uniform, the service’s goal, he said, was to operate at a level that was neither too harsh for the individual sailor nor too unbearable for the equipment vital to mission success. An adequate number of warships was integral to maintaining that balance. “We could use more carriers or less [operational] tempo,” Miller said. “It’s one or the other, but we’re a global Navy with global responsibilities, and so if we’re going to fulfill those, we need more ships.” Rear Adm. Thomas Moore, who led the Navy’s acquisition program and went on to become commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, told Congress in 2013 that the service is “an 11-carrier Navy in a 15-carrier world.” The demand is unlikely to dwindle, he said. Thirteen years since Moore’s statement, the Navy is still at 11 carriers. With the USS Nimitz scheduled to retire at the end of next year, that number may soon be 10.

note that the Nimitz was already supposed to have retired, and instead got its service extended

The USS Harry S. Truman and USS Gerald R. Ford are currently sidelined for maintenance after deployments, the latter of which notched a post-Vietnam record 326 days at sea in May after it was extended to support operations in the Middle East. The Nimitz-class USS John C. Stennis is undergoing a years-long overhaul. The USS Ronald Reagan, also a Nimitz-class, is expected to be deployable by the end of August after a 17-month repair period. The Nimitz-class USS George H.W. Bush is in the Middle East. “We just don’t have enough aircraft carriers right now in this rotation to sustain all the things we want to do, and I think this is a long-standing problem,” said Steven Wills, a Navy surface warfare officer who retired after 20 years. In 2014, the Navy began implementing the Optimized Fleet Response Plan, or OFRP, deployment model, which places maintenance, training, evaluations and a single eight-month deployment within a 36-month cycle. The service says the framework is intended to produce a more comprehensively manned and trained force while providing predictability to deployment schedules for sailors and their families. In 2016, however, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that heavy operational demands led the Navy to increase ship deployment lengths and reduce or defer ship maintenance. Those decisions made deployments less predictable, ate into training time, contributed to declining ship conditions and increased the time ships required for much-needed maintenance. From fiscal 2014 through 2019, Navy ships spent more than 33,700 additional days in maintenance beyond intended scheduling, leading to fewer vessels available for training or operations.

An upended supply network

While the Navy has long struggled with carrier availability, current U.S. leadership has created more operational tempo issues through poor planning and insufficient wartime support, according to lawmakers and a sailor who deployed in support of the Iran war. “Logistics was a complete failure the entire time out there — food, supplies, parts,” said the sailor, who served aboard an Independence-class littoral combat ship and was granted anonymity due to fear of reprisal. Iranian attacks damaged the Navy’s longstanding logistics hub in Bahrain in February, disrupting the regional supply network supporting ships operating in the Middle East. The Navy shifted the new logistics hub to Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that sits more than 2,000 miles away from the service’s carrier strike groups in the Middle East. Diego Garcia’s distance proved to be problematic, the sailor said, with the hub requiring the LCS to place a food order 30 days in advance. Those orders were nearly impossible, however, with an influx schedule exacerbated by poor planning, the sailor added. Sailors were unable to resupply from the hub, instead grabbing whatever could be salvaged from replenishment-at-sea oilers. “There’s no excuse for why, if we’re at war, we can’t get an expedited food order,” the sailor said. Rep. Mike Levin, D-Calif., told Military Times that the logistical issues described by the sailor were due to preparation failures. “I’ve spoken to a lot of people who’ve been deployed, and you know, the basic problem seems to be that if they were going to use Bahrain as a hub to restock, to get food and to provide rest and all that,” Levin said. “If that was the idea, well, clearly that didn’t work out. After February, March — [the administration] should have thought of that.”

‘People can break, too’

At least two sailors attempted to jump overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln, families of Lincoln sailors previously told Military Times. While the individual mental circumstances of the incidents remain unknown, the frantic operational tempo of combat operations inevitably takes a natural toll on service members, according to one sailor who has deployed to the Middle East aboard an aircraft carrier during the current conflict. “Just like machines, people can break, too,” said the service member, who was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal from leadership. “They need rest.” Time to rest was not always available. Losing sleep was sometimes part of ensuring safety. If equipment broke, sailors would, at times, work well beyond normal shifts until it was fixed. In some instances, completion of the task could mean the difference between life and death. In a 2021 review, the GAO found that just 14% of Navy officers surveyed slept at least seven hours per night during a recent deployment, while 67% reported five hours or less. GAO also found that the Navy routinely assigned fewer sailors to ships than workload studies indicated were needed to safely operate them. By 2023, surface-fleet sailors were averaging 5.25 hours of sleep every 24 hours, below the Navy’s standard of providing at least 7.5 hours of sleep opportunity. GAO identified crew shortfalls and mattress problems as challenges to managing fatigue. For its part, the Navy has implemented measures to try to address the issue, including initiating a study involving about 1,600 sailors wearing Oura rings to monitor sleep and other biometric indicators while underway.

But lack of sleep, according to personnel, has been just one detriment experienced during the conflict with Iran. Service members have also faced food shortages onboard the carrier, the sailor said, with quality that fluctuated between bad and horrible. “It was either undercooked, overcooked or unrecognizable at all,” the sailor said. As extensions piled on, a decline in morale took on a recognizable tone at the phone center or in conversations at the galleys. Humor darkened even more than usual, and port visits meant less and less. “These things have been happening on deployments for always,” said Parker Moore, a nuclear reactor operator who served aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln before its recent deployment. “It is bad, but it is always bad.”