The USS Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for eight months — the longest stretch without a port call in modern naval history — because a deployment scheduled to end in May was extended when the United States went to war with Iran. Jasper Craven’s reporting in The Nation treats that record not as an anomaly but as a stress test, and the crew has come out of it in the condition you would expect.
The ship is built to run indefinitely. Two Westinghouse reactors give it twenty-five years of sailing without refuelling; it carries 5,400 sailors and 90 aircraft. What is not built to run indefinitely is the crew, and the deployment’s damage was done largely through the ordinary stuff of human maintenance — clean water, food, soap, toothpaste, working plumbing, showers without mould, and mail that arrives.
The material record
By the accounts Craven assembles, the Lincoln’s crew got bad food, a shortage of soap and toothpaste, dirty water, mouldy showers and serious plumbing failures. The mail system failed too, swallowing care packages and deepening what he calls the crew’s “gnawing sense of isolation.” Thousands of sailors worked hundreds of consecutive days without a single day off.
That last detail matters because of how the Pentagon sources describe their work. Military food is engineered to caloric and dietary standards while staying lightweight and nonperishable; the rare “surf and turf” meal is read by service members not as generosity but as “an ominous harbinger of an unexpectedly long or heavy rotation to come.” Every comfort is also a scheduling instrument.
“Military brass today express a posture of constant vigilance while also proclaiming that the Pentagon is ‘a people business,’” Craven writes. “The truth, however, is that war is a body business, its planners calculating the most brutally efficient ways to maintain morale and manpower.”
What the research says about deployment
The mental-health evidence here is not anecdotal. A 2018 meta-analysis of 185 studies found consistently adverse mental-health effects from deployments, and a 2025 survey of 1,000 sailors found that nearly half considered the onboard services meant to address deployment stressors “grossly inadequate.”
The reported symptoms aboard the Lincoln track with that. Multiple sailors have attempted to jump into the sea. At a combative Navy town hall in San Diego in August, one wife relayed that her husband had texted her that “he hopes he doesn’t wake up tomorrow”; another parent said her daughter believes she will never come home and will die on the ship. Sailor Joshua Aviles wrote publicly that his father had been improperly detained by immigration authorities while awaiting green-card approval — a family crisis he could do nothing about from the Arabian Sea.
The official response
Rather than treat any of this as a signal, the institution has largely treated it as indiscipline. The Navy charged a sailor who jumped from the ship with “intentionally faking an illness or hurting themselves to avoid work, duty or service.” Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed the reported suffering as “misrepresented” and described the ship’s austere conditions as “incredible.” President Trump said the record deployment was “not nearly long enough.”
The civilian commentary followed the same line. Fox News commentator Joey Jones — a Marine Corps Reservist who lost both his legs in Afghanistan — went on air to complain about salty ramen noodles and six months without showering, and shouted at the camera: “How weak are you?!” Veterans on Reddit called the struggling crewmembers weak.
Craven situates that reaction in a longer history: training regimes that treat suffering, and even death, as “crucial precursors to heroism and true manhood,” where dissent reads as cowardice. The Navy’s unofficial motto, “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” comes from a War of 1812 commander whose surviving sailors ultimately waved the white flag — having decided, pragmatically, that victory was no longer available.
A capacity problem wearing a morale costume
There is a structural explanation underneath all of it. As one former Naval commander warned a decade ago, the Navy is “an 11-carrier Navy in a 15-carrier world” — a mismatch that surfaces as operational tempo borne by crews. Nearly half of 2024 was spent deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean; 2025 brought sustained exercises across Alaska. When the war began, the Lincoln simply stayed out, because there was no relief ship to send.
The politics of this are worth noting. The anger is coming from military families, many of them Trump voters. At the town hall, one woman questioned the mission and said she found it difficult to be proud of her sailor when she believed the military was “killing innocent civilians,” and said her sailor felt guilt about what he was doing. Her comments drew rousing applause.
The break that isn’t one
The Lincoln is expected to make a brief port call in Thailand and then spend a month sailing home. Military observers predict the stop will become “a maelstrom of hard-drinking debauchery.” Craven’s point is that blaming the sailors for that misses where the behaviour comes from. Heavy drinking is one of the few avenues the Pentagon offers for expelling stress, isolation and pent-up social and sexual energy — which is to say that even the military’s idea of rest is a pressure valve, and it leaves a mark too.
The men and women on that ship signed up for hard service. What they got was an institution that marketed itself as caring for people while treating them as consumables, and then disciplined them for saying so.