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.”

The Trump administration says large volumes of oil are slipping through the Strait of Hormuz. The trackers whose job it is to count the world’s oil shipments see much less Energy Secretary Chris Wright said last week the U.S. military had helped ship over 15 million barrels* of crude and oil products out of the waterway last Tuesday. He put the average oil exports through the strait over a seven-day period at more than 8 million barrels a day. Earlier this month, Wright said the seven-day average stood at around 9 million barrels a day. The count from commercial ship trackers tells a different story, with estimates ranging from roughly 2 million to 6 million barrels a day. Industry figures on the amount of crude oil and oil products being loaded onto ships in the Persian Gulf and delivered to buyers don’t corroborate the U.S. claims.

There are lots of reasons the numbers can diverge. Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery. Big tankers can carry 2 million barrels apiece, so missing one or two can make all the difference. Measurement periods also make a big difference, as do assumptions about how full ships are when they cross. Wright has said private data firms are undercounting ships that move covertly through the waterway. Still, a persistent gap remains between Washington’s estimates and what the market can independently verify. “What’s remarkable is how similar tanker trackers’ numbers are. You’d expect someone to have figured out a way to validate the White House numbers if there was a way,” said Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, an oil-market research firm. “As of yet, I haven’t seen anyone do it.” U.K. Maritime Trade Operations, which is affiliated with the Royal Navy, cited U.S. Navy data in a report over the weekend that said the U.S. facilitated 74 transits through Hormuz from Thursday through Saturday, or around 25 transits a day on average. The numbers don’t specify how many were oil tankers or how many barrels they carried. The UKMTO hasn’t independently verified the U.S. data, but believes it to be accurate, a person familiar with the matter said.

“Commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained at reduced levels,” UKMTO said in its report. “Independent tracking data indicated suppression with single-digit numbers transiting in both directions.” The discrepancy echoes the oil market’s familiar bane of “missing barrels”—volumes that show up in one set of figures but can’t readily be accounted for elsewhere. Such debates ultimately get settled in physical markets, where the oil is either available or it isn’t. So far, markets are relatively relaxed, with benchmark Brent crude futures elevated around $90 a barrel but well off their wartime highs, indicating the market isn’t desperate for supplies. Earlier in the war, a yawning gap emerged with physical market cargoes priced well above Brent futures, signaling immediate supply pressure and traders’ optimism that the war would be over soon. That gap—once as large as $36 a barrel—has narrowed to less than $6 in recent months, according to Argus Media, a price-reporting agency. Futures prices for oil that flow out of the Gulf, such as a grade of crude known as Dubai, have come down from $160 a barrel in late March to around $97 a barrel Friday, according to Argus Media. But the discrepancy does matter in terms of setting expectations for oil traders and for judging who is winning the economic war of attrition that Washington and Tehran are fighting, with oil as a key weapon.

The U.S. Navy for months has successfully guided some tankers through a protected route along the Omani side of the strait, eroding Iran’s control and easing the pressure on global oil markets. Iran responded in July by attacking ships using the route, sinking an agreement to open the waterway. On Monday, it threatened to fine or detain 46 ships it said had broken its rules for transiting the strait. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have also managed to route millions of barrels a day around the blockade by piping them across the desert to the Gulf of Oman or the Red Sea. Mohsen Rezaei, a top Iranian official, said late Sunday that those routes will be threatened if the U.S. continues its campaign of squeezing Iran’s economy. Kuwaiti, Iraqi and Emirati officials said some tankers are getting through under separate arrangements with Iran, meaning not all of the traffic is moving under U.S. protection. Ship trackers say roughly a third of the vessels that have transited the strait during August have used the Iranian-administered route along the northern reaches of the waterway.

With the war knocking out large volumes of supply, oil prices and the global economy are unusually sensitive to how much crude might come to market. Kpler, a ship-tracking firm, estimates that exports of crude and oil products through Hormuz have run at about 2.3 million barrels a day so far in August, down from 4.9 million barrels a day in July. Huax, another tracker, puts a current range for crude and refined products at 2 million to 5 million barrels a day. Johnston’s latest seven-day average of confirmed transits is about 4 million barrels a day, though he expects that to be raised to 5 million to 6 million as ships that made dark crossings turn their transponders back on after they clear the strait and their voyages can be reconstructed. Data from Vortexa, another tanker tracker, runs closer to the administration’s numbers but only across a short window. It says its seven-day average recently peaked at 9.2 million barrels a day. But its 28-day moving average, which the company says is more representative because it smooths out short-term spikes and volatility, remains at around 6 million barrels a day, underscoring how dramatically the picture can change depending on the dates selected.

The biggest problem for trackers is that many tankers are going dark. Ships normally broadcast their identity, position, speed and direction through AIS transponders, a radio-based automatic identification. But with many vessels switching off their AIS before crossing Hormuz, analysts have to reconstruct the voyages using satellite imagery and other clues. “So many ships are transiting dark, which makes it difficult to tally total tanker movements in real time,” said Bridget Diakun, maritime intelligence and research director at Lloyd’s List Intelligence. “We are partially waiting for AIS to come back on, but we also need to wait for satellite imagery to be available to validate sailings through Hormuz.” Satellites can help identify ships at berths in the Gulf and then in areas beyond the strait where ship-to-ship transfers occur. But satellite imagery just captures points in time and isn’t great for tracking the chokepoint itself, as it misses the bulk of the movements at night, she said. Detecting a ship doesn’t settle how many barrels moved. Analysts need to establish whether it was laden with oil or sailing empty. A very large crude carrier, or VLCC, is capable of holding roughly 2 million barrels, but that doesn’t mean it is full. The U.S. military has wider sources of information given its active presence around the Gulf, advanced sensors and communications with ships in transit. “I can’t get to 10 million barrels a day from the vessel and cargo picture available to me,” said Arsenio Longo, the founder of Huax. “The military may well be seeing vessels through radar, aircraft or other surveillance that commercial feeds miss.”

There is another way to check: Oil can’t move through the strait if it isn’t first put on tankers somewhere in the Persian Gulf. Those figures also don’t line up with the U.S. transit claims. LSEG puts crude and product loadings inside the Persian Gulf at about 4.4 million barrels a day in July and 1.9 million so far in August. The data provider says Iraq, which lacks a major bypass route, loaded just 1.1 million barrels a day so far this month, less than a third of prewar levels, while Kuwait loaded 0.5 million, one-fifth of its prewar rate. Kuwaiti officials say they are exporting more, around 1 million barrels a day. The ultimate check on Washington’s numbers is whether the barrels ultimately surface somewhere. Even if tankers disappear while crossing Hormuz, much of that oil should eventually show up in data on barrels unloaded to buyers or middlemen. So far, the U.S. government’s claimed volumes aren’t fully showing up in other countries’ import volumes. According to LSEG data, an average of 11.6 million barrels per day of Middle Eastern crude and refined products have been or are scheduled to be discharged in Asia. That number includes oil exports routed around Hormuz by pipeline, not just barrels escorted through the chokepoint.

A small number of gamblers have made $8 million placing military and defense-related bets on the Polymarket prediction site, most placed by about 150 accounts that almost always bet correctly. The researchers say they suspect the accounts are linked to military insiders who could be flagged for law enforcement as “the most likely potential insiders,” researchers said in a new report. When the most successful of those accounts bet on unlikely military events, researchers found, they won virtually every single time. “Traders acting on specialized, non-public information possess an edge that is valuable only within a limited set of markets, and that produces win rates difficult to attribute to luck,” researchers with the Anti-Corruption Data Collective said in a new report released Thursday. The researchers studied the small number of bettors who met two criteria: ”The concentration of their betting within less than 100 markets and two topics, and unusual accuracy (over 75%) of their longshot bets.” The same research group published a report in April that found a high risk of insider trading on military-related Polymarkets after observing that “longshot” bets on military operations won 52% of the time, which was four times more often than other types of markets.

While ‘whales’ often lose, ‘orcas’ almost always win

The collective’s new report hones in on 152 accounts, which researchers analyzed and found certain behaviors that “support our hypothesis that they are the most likely insiders.” The accounts, which researchers called “orcas” or “highly specialized, incredibly successful bettors,” were compared to whales, who spend the most on a wide range of markets to “devour enormous profits,” mostly at the expense of “small fish” bettors who tried their luck but end up “losing out badly to the fat larger competition.” The collective found that half of the orca accounts made their first long-shot bet within two days of making their Polymarket account and waged higher bets more often on high-risk, low-probability markets. The 152 orca wallets placed $2 million on military longshot bets and won 97.2% of the time for $8 million, or over $52,500 per wallet. Despite spending overall less money on bets than others, orcas still made a return of 132% compared to whales and small fish whose losses were as high as -2%. At least half of the orcas doubled their money.

The trends could pose larger national security implications, the report said. The collective observed orcas placing bets first that were then followed by whales (a group which also may include bot accounts) and small fish. As an example, orcas made a series of longshot bets around Feb. 16, 2025, and again 48 hours before the U.S. began its March strikes on Iran. Those bets were followed by whales and potential bots. “Because every Polymarket trade is visible on a public blockchain in real time, an insider betting on confidential military information is effectively broadcasting that information to foreign adversaries,” the collective said. “Copycat behavior amplifies these signals, making them virtually impossible to contain.” The collective also pointed out that Polymarket allows users to bet with cryptocurrency tools that make tracing an account to its owner next to impossible. As a result, pinpointing “potential suspicious activity,” like government officials or military personnel using non-public information for monetary gain, may not be possible. The report recommended that Polymarket require government-issued identification for all bettors. The group’s findings come amid ongoing insider betting cases involving U.S. and Israeli military personnel. In April, U.S. Army Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a special operations soldier, was arrested and charged for making more than $400,000 in Polymarket bets related to Venezuela and the U.S. raid and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Van Dyke was on a Navy vessel that helped stage the raid. In April, he pleaded not guilty and last month his lawyers asked for the case to be dismissed, arguing that federal prosecutors were trying to stretch current laws to make them fit his case. Several Israelis have also recently been arrested on suspicion of placing Polymarket bets based on classified information, including an arrest this month of an airman accused of using sensitive military information to bet on Iran and Yemen attacks. In May, Israel charged its first airman with similar crimes, and as part of his defense, the officer claimed that “The entire Israel Air Force is involved in gambling.”