For what it is worth, many deployments use to be 9 months up until the early 80s. I guess 45 years ago doesn’t help much at this point though.
Our Westpac was one of the first 6 months ones. They do suck.
I suspect they aren’t getting as much logistical support as they are supposed to when deployed, and that’s having an effect.
Another link (tried to add to the post above):
The Trump/Musk aid cuts may end up killing more than ten million people:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext
Human life only seems to matter to you in certain circumstances.
Which is basically why the tech oligarchs (among others) support him so fervently. They’re all about the eugenics.
This was you back in March, @Wesley_Clark. What a fucking joke. Do you feel stupid yet? Do you feel ashamed?
I suspect ships that plan for a 9 month deployment stock different stuff than ones that only plan to be out for 6 months. Also, if you sign up expecting 9 months, you know when the end is in sight.
Ships restock in ports and underway. Even a nuclear carrier can’t carry enough supplies for 6 months, nevermind 9.
BTW: I was on a conventional carrier, the Ranger. About 15% of our ship was Fuel Oil. All of today’s carriers are Nuke, so they can store more Jet Fuel and supplies, but still need to resupply.
Sure, there’s no way they carry 6 months of food. But “moldy showers and no soap” sounds like it could be a “deployed longer then planned” thing. I buy hand soap and shampoo in bulk, and don’t buy more often than once a year. There may be similar items on a naval vessel.
I suspect in the case of the USS Abraham Lincoln, there was no plan at all and Trump’s Department of (Flaccid) War thinks an aircraft carrier is self-sustaining via the power of America Fuck Yeah.
All such supplies can be transferred even underway. Hemsworth is a complete failure if this was a problem, which doesn’t seem like a stretch. Every time I hear him he sounds like a complete failure.
I recall even getting bales of rags at one port, not a Navy base. They had junior enlisted from most departments help Supply Dept store the rag supply.
Well, “no plan” and “terrible logistics” sounds in keeping with the folks currently in charge. So maybe that’s really the issue.
This really doesn’t feel like a big enough war that an aircraft carrier should have major difficulties resupplying basics, like soap.
And would you look at this? The Lincoln will be replaced by the USS George Washington:
So Iran has sent a US aircraft carrier packing by doing… nothing. I wonder how you say Mission Accomplished in Farsi.
By any reasonable standard the Lincoln should be heading home at this point. Rotating carriers on station is SOP. Standard Operating Procedure.
So while it is dismal the Lincoln has supply issues, this is no victory for Iran.
Remember, as fucked up as our leadership is, Iran’s is actually worse. No need to celebrate them even at the expense of Trump and company.
The guy has made his contempt for the logistics specialists that supply the beans and bullets known openly. I don’t think any of them are deliberately bilging their comrades in arms, but I can definitely see Hegseth getting angry at those rear echelon Poindexters and setting out orders that simply couldn’t be rationally fulfilled.
I mean, those WWII soldiers went years without getting home to their families, why can’t we do it now?
It’s certainly possible to do this resupplying - the US Navy has done underway replenishment for nearly a century - but it all requires planning. If you’re going to send a ship out to resupply a carrier in the Arabian Sea, you’ll need to have an idea of what that carrier will need, and ship it to your warehouses, get it on the ship in the right order so you don’t need to rearrange things in the hold while underway, send the ship out on a two-to-four week trip and make a rendezvous with a carrier strike group, disburse your cargo and pull some stuff on so that you can take it back to the states and get it started fixing… and then do it all over again every week or so. If that carrier’s mission has changed, or if your rendezvous time has changed because the carrier is staying on station rather than heading for home, that carrier might well run short of some essentials while all this is happening.
Easy to ask, but different world, different war. Those sailors in WWII were fighting a black and white war where we were attacked by surprise.
Seems like this time we did the surprise attack.
We’re softer as a nation these days though too. I found 6 months at sea and 121 between ports pretty tough and that was in the 80s. I was as close to WWII as today. We had plenty of fresh water and hot water and better supplies, but we were softer than that generation that had just come out the depression. I would suspect today’s sailor was softer yet.
We still had a big bad, the cold war and the USSR. For half the sailors, today’s big bad is their own Commander in Chief and Secretary of War.
Oops.
Sure, but 9 months deployment with reasonably frequent port calls and liberty isn’t what the Lincoln has been doing, which is 9 months at sea with no time in port. I didn’t think that long a deployment sounded all the unreasonable when I first heard it and then I heard the part about never making port that entire time.
Agreed, I just learned that a short time ago.