Ballpark numbers: USS Abraham Lincoln has about 5,000 people on board. And it is part of a larger carrier strike group that totals maybe 7,500 personnel. You need a long, strong global supply chain to serve that many people for months on end as they travel halfway around the world. Iran has apparently broken the chain in some key places.
Mental health is a separate problem. The Abraham Lincoln’s planned 6-month deployment is now at almost 9 months and counting, with no publicly announced return date. Wikipedia says the ship has only stopped at port twice in that time. So the sailors on board have been stuck in close quarters, away from their homes or loved ones, getting shot at in a war zone, for 3 months longer than expected, and with only two brief breaks. It’s not hard to understand that they might be exhausted and strained. Multiple sailors have tried to jump overboard and at least one sailor actually did it without being stopped. That’s not a supply chain problem; it’s a top-down organizational fiasco.
With that username I have to ask if you are prior service Navy? And I agree with your assessment, it’s a leadership issue.
No military background here. But through family and friends I have had a lot of interactions with military folks, and I’m loosely interested in military stuff.
My username is due to living near water my whole life, and enjoying being in and around it. I love fishing, paddling, swimming, skipping stones from shore, watching osprey catch fish, all of it.
Helicopters are very limited on weight and range. They cost thousands (maybe tens of thousands if they’re military) per hour to operate. A carrier has thousands of sailors on it.
You just couldn’t carry enough stuff to them in a reasonable amount of time.
How many beans do you think they could fit in one of those bad boys?
Hello mate it’s an aircraft carrier, they could use planes.
The place is also surrounded by ships, that’s kinda the whole point.
I suspect the reason is due to logistical regulations and internal control. You can’t just order things, it has to percolate through a massive bureaucracy.
People have posted about the supply chain stuff but there is another part to this.
Life on an AC is so fucking brutal…
It is 12-16 hours on and 8 hours off-ish… Your hours of off-ish is being stuck in a room with dozens of other sailors. Your space is a bunk about the size of a coffin and three drawers. So the off is just another state of brutality.
The 12-16 hours on is constant work of moving heavy things from here to there, the whole time there is an airport over your head or doing that on the flight line.
Your clothes never really dry out.
Your skin is chaffed and hurts a lot.
The air always smells like some form of exhaust.
There is no privacy.
When you take a shit, at least three other people are aware of you taking a shit.
You see an AC is not meant to be deployed this long. The Navy knows this. The fucked up, abusive ass, class system based fucked up Navy knows you don’t have an AC out this long.
Who does the Navy have to answer to now?
The pedophile rapist felon who likes his soldiers when they don’t get captured?
It’s a war zone. Logistics win wars because this is difficult.
The USN has literal fleets of underway replenishment ships. It’s a concept they pioneered and essentially perfected, and it’s been done for decades. Logistics is hard, but the pentagon used to be world-beatingly good at it. Turns out that when you have absolute fuckwits running the show, they can ruin the whole logistical pipeline pretty fucking quick, though.
Let’s just say this: if they really cared they could resupply Lincoln. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
I think that Iran (or at least one of ally) successfully strike the base that resupply the Lincoln. So yeah they could bring some helicopters but it takes time.
