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Stars and Swipes The USS Lincoln’s retreat exposes the cracks in Trump’s war machine
The carrier’s troubled deployment has shown the deep problems with US military readiness, logistics and morale under Trump and Hegseth.
AND SO IT’S over. The mighty USS Lincoln has turned tail and is limping towards its San Diego base with its malnourished, exhausted and thoroughly demoralised crew of 5,000 sailors. The decision to end the longest at-sea deployment in modern US warfare came only after a land mutiny by the sailors’ families and a public outcry about the conditions they had been forced to endure.
The Lincoln’s retreat is the latest humiliation heaped upon humiliation as the US’s conflict with Iran grinds on with no solution in sight. A week ago, reports that Donald Trump had hidden in a catering truck to evade a possible strike on Air Force One provided Iran with a propaganda dividend that its regime leaders could hardly have imagined; a tsunami of online memes that mocked and taunted the US with images of a fearful and cowering US President crammed into a container of aeroplane food.
The cracks within the US military, its ruptured supply chains, rock-bottom morale and abject failures in logistics and planning are on full public display.
So too is the apparent contempt that Trump and Pete Hegseth, his self-styled Secretary of War, have for members of the US military and their families. Trump’s response was a flippant dismissal of claims of dire conditions, adding for good measure that the Lincoln’s nine-month deployment was ‘not nearly long enough.’
Understandably, Trump’s response sparked fury amongst the families of the sailors. It’s not just the rotting food, the overflowing toilets, the contaminated drinking water, the mould-infested showers or the chronic sleep deprivation. Most of the 5,000 seamen aboard the USS Lincoln are on the lower rungs of the military totem pole. They work 12 to 14-hour days, seven days a week, for a basic salary that works out to around $6 an hour, lower than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. There is no overtime and no days off.
The Commander in Chief’s indifference belies the importance of the military vote. With the mid-terms looming, this is not a constituency Trump can afford to alienate. Military families represent a massive voting bloc. There are around 1.3 million full-time active-duty members of the US military and a further 800,000 in the ranks of the National Guard and Reserves. 48 million Americans have either served in the military or are immediate family dependents.
Between 32 and 35 million are eligible voters. Deriding those serving in an active conflict is hardly a winning strategy – for war or elections.
The political angle
Republicans fear that the bungled response from both Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth – denouncing the military families, denying the crisis and then blaming the media before finally backing down and ending the Lincoln’s deployment – could add to their midterm woes.
But it’s not just the USS Lincoln. Reports are surfacing that conditions aboard the escort destroyer ships that are policing the blockade of Iran are just as bad.
Earlier this week, it emerged that a Navy destroyer deployed in the South China Sea was hit by a complete loss of power last month when its generators broke down. It drifted for four days, leaving more than 300 sailors without safe drinking water, meals, functioning toilets or air conditioning before being towed to the Philippines, where it took a further 12 days to repair the power systems.
The entire US military appears to be straining at the seams, unequal to the challenge of waging war against an enemy that has stared down the US with little other than a dwindling stash of drones and ballistic missiles and an iron will.
The rotating out of the Lincoln has exposed further shortcomings in logistics and planning. The US Navy has just 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in its entire fleet. As a result of this debacle, the world now knows that two of them are undergoing dry dock overhauls that will take years to complete, a further two have returned to the US in urgent need of repairs and maintenance, while three further carriers are classified as ‘pre-deployment ’, meaning they lack the crew, munitions or other hardware necessary for deployment to a war zone.
It transpired that the US had only one aircraft carrier at its disposal, the USS George Washington, which was the sole US carrier deployed in the Pacific. Moving the Japan-based carrier to plug the gap in the Middle East opens up a dangerous vacuum which creates a national security risk of its own according to retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, the former head of the US Pacific Command, who claims it will take three years for the Navy fleet to return to full readiness. So how does the Commander in Chief plan to cover the shortfall in the meantime?
Trump’s answer is to focus on unnecessary and expensive changes to the latest addition to the US fleet, an aircraft carrier that’s already two years behind schedule. It’s the ballroom meets the reflecting pool all over again. Only this time he’s insisting on bringing his much-vaunted construction skills to fiddling about with the design of an aircraft carrier to ensure it looks more like World War II carriers, which Trump believes had a better ‘look’.
He’s demanding changes that will delay completion, cost billions of dollars and make the carriers less efficient. Chief amongst his obsessions is the replacement of the modern electromagnetic systems to launch fighter jets with World War II-era steam-powered catapults and the repositioning of the aircraft’s command centre from the rear to the centre. Amid the current crisis, the Acting Navy Secretary has been given 60 days to come up with a redesign plan.
Riding out the storm
Most experts think the Navy will just nod and wait Trump out rather than implement the changes he’s demanding. Much as they’re doing with his other pet project – the ‘Golden Fleet’ of ‘Trump-class’ warships. But tinkering around with the optics is doing nothing to deal with the very real logistical and preparedness challenges that currently exist.
On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats squabble about who is at fault. Hegseth is one of the most reviled figures in Washington and the Pentagon. His unfitness for his role seems to be one of the few topics on which there is some bipartisan agreement.
Congress allocated the Pentagon more than $1 trillion (€861.7 billion) for military expenditure in 2026, of which $300 billion (€258.51 billion) was earmarked for the Navy. So why can’t Hegseth feed the USS Lincoln’s sailors? Or keep the lights on aboard the USS Benfold? Or plan for a replacement carrier that doesn’t open up an alarming new vulnerability?
Democrats on the Senate and House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees claim Hegseth concealed the impact of the Iranian strike on the US’s 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. The 28 February retaliatory strikes didn’t just kill and injure US soldiers. They disrupted the Navy’s regional logistics and supply chains. More strikes on targets in Kuwait and the UAE cut off fresh food sources, forcing Navy supply ships to divert to the US base at Diego Garcia, some 2250 miles away.
Meanwhile, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies has warned that the conflict with Iran has led to a massive reduction in its supply of interceptors and munitions. “There are no good alternatives to Patriot and ThAAD for ballistic missile defence,” it declared in a report published three weeks ago.
This depletion of stocks, and a three-year timeline for their replenishment, is thought to have forced Trump’s latest volte-face: from warning of the biggest military offensive since World War II to the current focus on economic sanctions and the ongoing US blockade.
Luckily, Hegseth has plenty of things to keep him busy during the lull in hostilities. Like ensuring that all 1.3 million active-duty members of the military comply with his ban on facial hair. And have their testosterone levels checked. Whilst maintaining the correct body mass index.
Once again, Washington is awash with rumours that his days are numbered. But those predicting his demise should note that when it came to choosing who should join him in the catering truck and who should be left behind as the unwitting targets of a possible Iranian strike, the only people Trump deemed worth saving were his constant companion Natalie Harp, his body man, his former golf caddie – and Hegseth.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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