Supposedly it’s on its way home after a record deployment. I really don’t understand how it was allowed to run out of food, if the story is true. I would have thought there would be mucho money made by someone to keep the shelves stocked, and if anything, they would have too much. A strange complaint by some was unsanitary toilets and showers. How does that happen? Nobody cleans latrines, or heads, or whatever they’re called on aircraft carriers? They just get funkier and funkier until the ship is decommissioned? Seem like there would be a pressure washer somewhere on the ship they could borrow. Anyway, I’m glad they’re finally coming back. Now we need the rest of them back, too.
Well of course. But there’s even more money in getting the contract to keep the shelves stocked, but then just not doing it.
Their normal food/fuel/supplies depot is in Kuwait, which the Iranis put out of commission early on. That meant that resupply would have to be obtained at Diego Garcia, which is some 2200 miles away. Diego Garcia is basically owned by Great Britain, who initially refused to allow American ships to resupply there (that has now changed). So they were stuck. Even worse, no shore leave for most of that deployment means that the sailors are pretty stir crazy by now. Not a good combination for people who have some of the most dangerous jobs you can have, operating on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Public outcry has resulted in the ship now heading for home.
It’s an aircraft carrier. You can land planes on it. Including cargo planes. Fly in supply planes from, well, pretty much anywhere. Sure, it’d be more expensive than just sailing up to a dock and lowering ramps, but if you really want to keep a carrier on station somewhere for an extended time, it could be done.
No, just no.
Supply ships and underway replenishment is how you keep the fleet supplied. Not small planes landing on the carrier deck.
Even the mail planes have small cargo capacity, jets have almost none. You could fly in vital medical supplies or parts, not food and cleaning supplies in meaningful amounts.
The cargo planes small enough to land on a carrier are not large enough to carry meaningful supplies of food for 5000 people. They also cannot fly all that far fully loaded. Furthermore, they are easy to shoot down.
Abe has been conducting siege operations, under the leadership of people with little to no military experience. It requires deep military knowledge to 1) Foresee a siege and supply the ship accordingly, 2) Ration properly to maintain supply throughout the siege, 3) prioritize mail delivery so that family, friends, and USO can provide small luxuries and 4) maintain morale throughout.
The few truly experienced military commanders left have not been receiving proper briefings and have been preparing for deployments based upon lies and assumptions. This is what happens when liars and guessers and bullshitters try to conduct a war.
They did have too much. . . For the five or nine day war they were told to supply for. That’s why they have survived this long.
Somebody asked about cleaning the bathrooms - I would guess that’s a combination of short bleach supplies, short water supplies, and low morale.
A ship at sea makes potable water as it moves, from the heat of the engines. When it is stuck in one place, the water rations go waaayyy down. While Abe has been moving slowly back and forth, engines have not been at full rev, so I’d imagine showers are short and far between. This has been an even bigger problem for the ships stuck inside the strait.
There are reports that hygiene supplies are also low. Families and friends have sent care packages, which were “lost” in the mail or languished undelivered. Protein bars and other food supplements were past their expiry dates by the time the were delivered. Other packages just disappeared.
I’ve spent my whole life in a military family and I understand how important the mail is. It’s the primary driver of morale. Hegseth thinks that since they have e-mail and phone calls now they don’t need to put priority on mail service. Hegseth is an idiot.
They’ve had flash evaporators since I was in 40+ years ago, as long as they have power, carriers have fresh water. One thing the USS Lincoln would never be short of is power. Nuclear Reactors and all.
Quoted for truth!
The worst Secretary of War since John B. Floyd
The reactors run the engines. Waste heat from the engines runs the flash evaporator. When the ship is at low cruising speed, less heat = less water. Nobody is saying they don’t have enough to drink. But they don’t have enough for daily showers either.
That’s sounds wrong, the evaps were just part of the regular steam supply, not waste heat. I was EM, not BT or MM but I did learn the steam cycle inside out. Still a snipe.
Though nearly 40 years later, I might be misremering.
Come to think of it, flight operations require cruising to launch, and generally keeping the fleet safe, they should be cruising most of the time.
Based on the limited research I did into this exact question, it seems there can be mold accumulation in areas where no amount of swabbing the deck will make a difference. It reaches a point where you have start dismantling things in a manner which cannot be done while the ship is underway.
I’ll bet a pressure washer could get into a lot of those tight places. I wonder if they could use sea water if potable water is rationed.
But where would it push the mold off to? Probably not a good plan.
This is just an example of things that are meant to be maintained during port calls. And port calls haven’t happened normally for several months running.
This is from AI (Google Gemini) so take it as you will but it sounds a little more involved than that:
When mold embeds itself into ship infrastructure, sailors or shipyard contractors perform full tear-outs using specific industrial procedures:
Overhead Insulation Removal: Ventilation pipes running above showers sweat constantly in warm waters. Moisture builds up behind the fire-retardant fiberglass insulation blanket (lagging). Workers wearing full-face respirators and protective suits strip out all contaminated lagging down to the bare steel frame.
Tile and Deck Rip-Outs: Water often gets trapped underneath wet-decking coatings and tile grout. Contract teams use pneumatic chipping hammers to strip the deck down to the raw steel hull plate, needle-gun away any hidden corrosion, and treat the bare metal.
HVAC Duct Scraping & Fogging: Mold easily colonizes air ducts. Ductwork is opened up, mechanically brushed, and treated with EPA-registered anti-microbial fogging agents. In severe cases, section lines are replaced entirely.
But cleaning it is only part of the process, it seems they also try to prevent it from happening again:
Removing mold solves only the symptom; fixing the root cause requires engineering upgrades:
Upgrading Ventilation Systems: Older Navy carriers often struggle with under-designed exhaust fans that fail to clear steam fast enough. Maintenance crews replace old exhaust blowers and adjust cubic-feet-per-minute (CFM) air movement to maintain negative pressure in wet spaces.
Mold-Inhibitive MIL-SPEC Coatings: Instead of standard marine enamel, shipyard crews apply specialized Navy-approved interior coatings (such as MIL-PRF-24596 variants formulated with anti-fungal additives) that prevent spores from taking hold on painted bulkheads.
Seamless Grout/Decking: Traditional tiled floors with tile grout are increasingly replaced with seamless, epoxy-based terrazzo decking system pours that eliminate seams where moisture and fungi hide.
Again, this sounds like it would be difficult to do while the ship is moving.
That’s what has me baffled. Supposedly the Navy has the unique (among world navies) capability to resupply their ships nearly completely while at sea.
Unless it was deemed too dangerous, there’s no reason I can think of why they shouldn’t have been adequately supplied. Hell, the Navy pulled that off during WW2. They should have only become better at it since then.
The water would just flow into other spaces and cause issues there. I’ll give a specific example from my time:
I worked arresting gear. We had a small “ready room” just inside the hull where we hung up our flight deck gear (vests and helmets). It was like a small locker room. The passageway from weather to the opening of the ready room to the first interior passageway was maybe 8 or so feet. The hatch to the weather deck was usually open as was the hatch to the interior hallway. This passageway connected to our bunkroom/work spaces. When it rained, the interior passage would get wet (it was a graphite (?) tiled floor. We got mold in there. Bad. Next time we were in port, we tore the tile out and sandblasted the floor and lower walls to bare metal. We painted the walls and floor with a mold-resistant paint and then poured a rubber floor. This took about a week or so, during which the passageway was effectively unusable.
No big deal IN PORT because we had other ways to the flight deck that were fine to use when not conducting flight ops, but during flight ops that passageway was far and away the easiest, safest, most convenient way to get to where we needed to be to conduct flight operations. So not something you close for a week plus at sea when conducting combat-ready flight ops.
FYI, we still occasionally got mold in there, but only on the walls and it was a LOT easier to deal with without closing the passageway to use.
The people who make those plans have to act like they believe Trump when he says the war will be over in a few days. They can’t get orders from Hegseth on down to resupply realistically for the long haul. So “they’ll be fine” for a few more days, another week, comes down the pike again and again and again.
When Trump said yesterday that Abe hadn’t been deployed “nearly long enough” it was the closest that anyone in leadership has come to admitting this siege will continue indefinitely. Maybe it’s enough that the Roosevelt will come in fully supplied, and with re-supply orders in place. I hope so.
But when I see headlines like the Navy is “scrambling” to send the Roosevelt carrier group to relieve Abe, it does not set my heart at ease.
I was just assuming the shower and toilet rooms would have ample drains and be water resistant.