The Guardian interviewed three families of sailors. One of them passed on a message from her brother, “Our deployment resilience counsellor quit months ago. To see the ONLY PSYCHIATRIST is a five-week wait unless you do like three of our shipmates and jump off the ship or take 27 sleeping pills.” So yeah, some of the “attempted” jumps might be people seeking help in any way possible.
And even if they aren’t just trying to get noticed, suicide ideation rarely is a definite, committed decision. There’s a lot of hesitation. It’s very believable to me that a legitimate attempt could be preceded by a long pause at the edge.
Shooting down a US Navy plane making a run to a carrier group is not an easy task.
But, I mean, yeah - food for five THOUSAND PEOPLE is tons and tons of food a day. You could definitely do it; the US Navy’s carrier cargo planes are more capable than I think you realize. A C-2 or CMV-22 can carry tons of stuff. You could keep the crew fed that way. You’d still need multiple deliveries a day, though, thereby disrupting normal operations. You would not be able to use much fresh food, and it’d be logistically complicated and wasteful. It is a last resort approach.
I would guess an aircraft carrier would need at least 15-20 tons of food every day, pre-prepataion The C-2 can carry a max load of maybe 8-9 tons, but there’s no way you could be quite that efficient if he cargo is food.
They are awesome. Back in the 80s I and a couple friends met and befriended a Navy guy who had no family anywhere near the area. He was on a Destroyer Escort. It came in after a long deployment and we waited for him. All of the sailors are standing on deck looking out for their loved ones. Danny didn’t expect to have anyone to meet and when he saw us he was beyond overjoyed. It was incredibly moving.
OK, the CMV-22 has a range of about 1150nm and can carry 3 tons (6000lbs). So where are the supplies flying from?
Diego Garcia is far, too far away.
Please, non-Navy people, stop trying to invent a magical supply system when the standard Unreps could have and should have handled the job without issue.
The problem wasn’t that the ABE was out of food. The food may have been shite, and even some of it was rationed, but the sailors were still getting fed. I don’t think they were at any point at “send food by any means possible” levels of food shortage. Just one more “embrace the suck” situation piled on top of others, making morale miserable.
The Americans have bases fucking everywhere. That’s not the issue. The issue is constant disruption to carrier operations, the fact the quality of food will have to decline (you’d have to eschew most fresh food) and strain on doing a LOT more cargo offloading.
And on a too-long deployment you’re gonna run out of other shit, too. So it’s not just food. The crew needs toiletries, they need their medicines, they need mail. The ship has a limited capacity for things like spare parts, consumables, sundries. And they need munitions. Those are BFSes, but there’s a limit to the cargo space.
As Dorjan points out, the sailors weren’t literally going without food. That’s not the real risk.
And all of those bases have their own logistics problems and people to feed. Most of them are not geared to send supplies to ships at sea, but rather to support the men and women assigned to that particular base. When I was retired from the Navy and working for a contractor in Belgium, I was not allowed to shop at the nearby military base commissary unless I had specific authorization from the CO of that base. That’s how tight supplies were.
I remember back in the late 60s I spent a summer in San Francisco with friends going to SF State. One had a high school friend in the Navy who was local, and he hung out with us. When his ship sailed for Vietnam, we all walked out to the middle of the GG Bridge, so we could wave him on his way. Very cool. Weird memory we went to see a rom com with Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve (IIRC) called The April Fools. It became his favorite movie.
I assume the ship will need to go to San Diego or Newport News for an extended stay for repairs and such. How long will that take? Nine months? A full year?
That blows my mind. After the battle of the Coral Sea the USS Yorktown, badly damaged, headed for Pearl Harbor. Repairs were being made the whole way but there is only so much that can be done at sea. The ship needed much more work in a harbor.
Estimates were 90 days at a minimum. Dock workers got it done in three days (really…although the ship sailed to Midway with workers still aboard fixing things).
And here we are saying they can’t fix the toilets in 18 months???
No one said that. You’re misreading what I wrote.
They work in port will probably be a couple of months.
The Yorktown is a famous situation that included everyone in Pearl Harbor that could help, helping and rolling power outages of the Island to ensure all the power they needed was available. It was emergency repairs and continued on the way to Midway. I doubt borked toilets was even on the checklist for that repair. It was about the flightdeck and fire fighting equipment especially.
Still, even with the exceptional efforts given to Yorktown I find it hard to do the math that lets Yorktown sail in three days after serious battle damage and the Abraham Lincoln needing 18 months.
Maybe the Lincoln is due for a major overhaul and now is the time (I dunno). That would make sense to take 18 months.