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

Hi, it's Rachel Abrams. I'm one of the hosts of the Daily. It's very nice to meet you. Yeah, hey, 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 on board 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 asked when's your husband coming home? You know, you just have to say, "Oh, well, we're sinking too. No, we think July. We think August. But, you know, 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 or, you know, however many, I can't even, I don't even know what 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 cooked, 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? I was like, "Are you hungry? This is not okay. We're acting 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, and 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 war fighting 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 what it should be. It's Tuesday, August 18th. John Ismay, welcome to the Daily. Thanks for having me. 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. I want to talk about 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 of some of the issues here. 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 take in from on board the ship and then sent to their family. One was a photo of what breakfast was like for 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 in a camera crew aboard recently, then there were eggs and there were vegetables. There was a whole bunch of food. And then I got a photo of what a meal looked like after CNN departed the ship, and it was back to pretty meager rations. So, you know, food issues aside, there were more serious allegations. We got reports or we heard reports that a sailor had tried to jump overboard from the Lincoln. 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 to gain traction in the national news cycle. What's happened here is, in many ways, a betrayal of trust by the Pentagon stop 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 lack of political attitude about men and women and their deployments just kind of reflects what he actually thinks about them. He thinks about more as toys, not the fact that they truly can and they are humans. And then, Pete Hankseth comes out and denies everything on the record. Completely misrepresented. Listen, we make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment. Saying, essentially, there are no problems. And then, today, you've got President Trump. You're a loud, boisterous person, you're afraid to speak quiet. Who lashed out at a reporter who asked questions. Mr. President, is there enough food on the USS Lincoln? Yeah, 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 that are 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 deployment for a warship is generally about six months. Cares 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 that maybe 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. A 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 your office. Or your 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. Some jobs are sort of the worst conditions are what we call port and starboard watch where you're on for six offer six on for six offer 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. Being stuck on a ship with your colleagues under such intense conditions, that sounds frankly quite awful and almost like a psychological experiment when you throw in the lack of sleep and you are saying the 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 career just this year that came, you know, back to Norfolk after like 11 months at sea. record for the longest carrier 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, right? You know, lack of sleep has been shown to, you know, I think it was being awake for 24 hours is like having a.1 blood alcohol content and fatigue creates safety problems. You know, 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 our two buckets of issues. Like there 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's 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 and bagged food. So if you ever get fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, it can actually be a huge more albus, just because you haven't had these things for so long. You're mentioning, after two or three weeks, you run out of fruits and vegetables. And just to remind everybody, we're talking about nine months here. Yeah. Have you ever eaten dehydrated eggs? Mercifully not. No. Yeah. Well, I mean, in the Navy, nobody's expecting a gourmet meal. From 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 in making things taste better. But based on the photos that I'm getting from family members of crew members on the the Lincoln, the food appears to be rationed. It doesn't appear that 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 U.S. Central Command, and for the Secretary of Defense to basically be saying, warrior ethos, war is hell, all those things, I don't think that really cuts it. 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. 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 difficulty 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. There are people going to and from the ships in the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Iran 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 Iran 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 destroyed? Like destroyed. Yeah. I was told that there's 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 logistic train is much, much, much longer. So instead of maybe being 100 miles, it's now 2200 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 Iran where those two carrier strike groups and all the destroyers are to Diego 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. Okay. 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. And if you took a ship as big as an aircraft carrier and parked it at, say, the Emirati port of Fujira, which is on the Gulf of Oman side of the straighter hermos, you're sitting duck. You know, it's a time-consuming process getting a ship that size in and out of port. It doesn't happen quickly. 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 sea, 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 of 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 are the knockdown effects of that for the Lincoln specifically? So when a ship is out to sea, 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 be. to accomplish the mission, meaning what kind of shape are the engines in, you know, or in the case where the carrier, you know, it's nuclear reactors and all the associated equipment. And up on the flight deck, there was this coating we called non-skid. It's basically a rippled asphalt that goes up on the deck to make sure that people in planes and helicopters don't slide around it. 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. And 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 you know, 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? When you 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 Yokosuka Japan in the US seventh fleet. That ship is basically there in case of emergency brake glass. Do you send the carrier from Yokosuka outside of the seventh fleet? And that's exactly what's happening right now. The USS George Washington is the Japan based carrier. And that ship is being sent to relieve the Lincoln right now. Might still be a week or more for the ship to get there. But that creates what you call an opportunity cost. If the George Washington is not in the South China Sea as an deterrent for North Korea and China, you're basically out of luck. You would 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 Yokosuka, 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. So basically just months into this war with Iran, the US Navy is essentially using its brake 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 all 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, the zero sum game, if you will, I can't help it wonder whether or not that very thing, that very issue intention is perhaps one of the reasons that previous administrations dealing with these same persistent prompts of the Iran didn't go to war to begin with earlier. Like in other words, how predictable was all of this? So for decades, the Navy has assumed that any attack on Iran would result in the Iranians immediately shutting down the straight homies. You know, they have minds, they have missiles, all of that. And they've also assumed that Iran would target American logistics in the area. Bahrain would be expected to be wiped out on day one. And that's exactly what happened. Iran closed the straight on day one. So really, only if you launch 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 base in Bahrain, where you could resupply ships, the fact that you're moving things in and out of Duke or see a to me speaks to a real failure of planning. We have heard in recent days from the administration that help is 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 straight of Malacca in Indonesian waters likely would take a week, maybe longer to get there, you know, just quick back to 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. And talking to 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 consolation prize of going to Thailand or 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 family members I talked to, 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. Jon is me. Thank you so much. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Construction on a border security road in Texas's Big Bend National Park has been temporarily halted pending a visit by the Customs and Border Protection Commissioner to assess the project. Contractors have been building a new patrol road and vehicle barriers along the border with Mexico, carving a path with bulldozers and excavators through some of the park's major natural attractions. The work had drawn national attention, bipartisan criticism, and several lawsuits. Local law enforcement officials have said the border infrastructure is costly and unnecessary, and in a desolate and undeveloped area where few migrants have ever crossed, even during times of peak migration. And a preliminary investigation into the death of actress Hayden Penetere produced no evidence of foul play. The first responders found that the actress had suffered from cardiac arrest after an apparent drug overdose, according to a person with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The 36-year-old, known for TV shows including Nashville and Heroes, had been open about her struggles with substance abuse and mental health issues after rising to fame as a teenager. Today's episode was produced by Lexi Dio, Jessica Chung, and Shannon Lynn. It was edited by MJ Davis Lynn and Michael Benoit, with research help from Susan Lee. It contains music by Marion Lzano and Pat McCusker. Our theme music is by Wunderly, and this episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.