USS Abraham Lincoln
The USS Abraham Lincoln: What Does Its Extraordinary Deployment Tell Us About America’s War with Iran?
by David Palethorpe
As a former Royal Navy Warrant Officer there is something deeply uncomfortable about the story of the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Not because an American aircraft carrier has spent an extraordinary amount of time at sea.
Aircraft carriers are built to operate at sea, and the United States Navy has demonstrated time and again that it can sustain very demanding deployments.
What troubles me is what the Lincoln’s deployment appears to tell us about the planning, sustainability and assumptions behind America’s war with Iran.
The Lincoln has now been deployed for more than 260 days, with more than 200 days without a port call.
Around 5,000 sailors and Marines are aboard.
The ship has been heavily involved in American operations against Iran.
The Navy says the carrier has conducted more than 10,000 sorties and dropped about 1.5 million pounds of ordnance during the deployment.
Whatever your opinion of the war itself that is an extraordinary operational achievement.
But it also raises an extraordinary question.
Was this what the United States planned for?
The question nobody should be afraid to ask
I am not questioning the courage or professionalism of the personnel aboard the Abraham Lincoln.
Quite the opposite.
If anything, they deserve enormous credit.
They have continued to operate aircraft, maintain machinery, stand watches, refuel aircraft, conduct replenishment operations and carry out combat missions while being separated from their families for months on end.
The question is therefore not about their commitment.
It is about the people who planned, (or didn’t) the operation.
When a country sends its armed forces into a war, there are some very basic questions that must be answered before the first shot is fired.
What are we trying to achieve?
How long is it expected to take?
What forces are required?
What ammunition, fuel, spare parts and personnel will those forces consume?
What happens if the war lasts twice as long as expected?
And perhaps the most important question:
What is the plan for replacing those forces when they reach the limits of sustainable deployment?
Those are not political questions.
Those are not morality questions.
They are military questions.
They are logistics questions.
And ultimately, they are questions of leadership.
America we are told did have declared objectives
It is important to be fair here.
It would be wrong to claim that the Trump administration simply went to war with Iran without announcing any objectives.
The US government described Operation Epic Fury as having specific aims, including destroying Iran’s offensive missile capability and production, destroying its navy and other security infrastructure, and preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
So there were objectives.
But an objective written on a briefing document isn’t the same thing as a credible end-state.
Destroying an enemy’s military capability is not necessarily the same thing as ending a war.
And this is where I think the Lincoln raises a much bigger issue.
If the military operation continues for month after month, then at some point the original assumptions about duration, force requirements and logistics has to be revisited.
The Lincoln was originally expected to return much earlier. Its deployment was subsequently extended, leaving the carrier and its crew at sea for an extraordinary period.
That should make every taxpayer, politician and military professional ask:
What changed?
A carrier isn’t a consumable item
One of the things that should concern the USA public most is the way their leaders discuss military hardware as though it were simply another entry on an inventory sheet.
America has aircraft carriers.
Therefore, send one.
But a carrier isn’t a box of ammunition.
It is a floating city and an enormously complicated industrial machine.
There are thousands of people aboard.
There are nuclear reactors, turbines, generators, pumps, electrical systems, aviation fuel systems, weapons systems, radar, communications equipment, aircraft maintenance facilities and hundreds of other systems that must function continuously.
And all of them require maintenance.
The longer the ship remains deployed, the greater the maintenance burden becomes.
Some maintenance can be performed at sea.
Spare parts can be flown out.
Technicians can be delivered.
Replenishment ships can provide fuel, food, ammunition and other supplies.
The US Navy should be exceptionally good at this.
But there is a fundamental limit.
You cannot fly a shipyard to a carrier.
Eventually machinery requires industrial-level maintenance.
Eventually personnel require proper rest and relief.
Eventually aircraft need deeper maintenance.
Eventually the ship itself needs to return to a facility capable of doing the work that cannot be done at sea.
That isn’t a criticism of the United States Navy.
It’s engineering reality.
The human beings aboard the ship
And then there is the issue that I think has been unfairly lost in the political argument: the people.
Reports have emerged of shortages, poor living conditions, mould and serious concerns about mental health aboard the Lincoln.
Families have raised concerns about the welfare of personnel, while lawmakers have called for investigations.
The Pentagon has disputed some of the more severe characterisations of conditions aboard the ship.
We should therefore be careful.
We don’t know that every allegation is accurate.
We shouldn’t turn unverified claims into established facts.
But we also shouldn’t dismiss them.
Because even if only some of these reports are accurate, they raise an important question about how long a crew can reasonably be expected to remain at sea under combat conditions.
Military service involves hardship.
Everyone who joins a navy knows that.
But hardship is not the same thing as poor planning.
There is a difference between asking personnel to endure difficult circumstances because the operational situation genuinely requires it and asking them to endure them because there was no adequate relief plan.
That distinction matters.
This is where logistics becomes strategy
I have always thought that one of the most underestimated aspects of military planning is logistics.
People like to talk about aircraft, missiles, aircraft carriers and precision weapons.
But ultimately, an army or navy fights with what it can sustain.
Montgomery understood this at El Alamein.
The D-Day planners understood it.
Eisenhower understood it.
One of the greatest ever planners, General George Marshall understood it.
The lesson is brutally simple:
You cannot sustain military operations with bravery alone.
You need fuel.
You need ammunition.
You need food.
You need spare parts.
You need replacement personnel.
You need maintenance facilities.
And you need a plan for what happens when your most important assets have been operating continuously for far longer than anticipated.
That is why the Lincoln matters.
It isn’t merely a story about one aircraft carrier.
It is potentially a window into the wider problem of force generation.
The relief problem
The US Navy has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
That sounds impressive.
It is impressive.
But not all eleven are available for combat operations at the same moment.
Some are deployed.
Some are preparing for deployment.
Some are training.
Some are undergoing maintenance.
Some may be dealing with delays or unexpected problems.
This is where the difference between inventory and capability becomes important.
If one carrier must remain deployed for eight or nine months because another carrier isn’t immediately available to replace it, then the question isn’t whether America owns enough carriers.
The question is whether it has enough deployable and sustainable carrier capacity.
The fact that the USS George Washington is now being sent towards the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln is therefore significant.
Reports indicate that this movement may have consequences for the American carrier presence in the Indo-Pacific.
In other words, solving one problem can create another.
Move the carrier from the Pacific to the Middle East and the Middle East problem becomes easier.
But what happens to the Pacific?
That is precisely what strategic planning is supposed to anticipate.
And then there are America’s allies
There is another issue that I believe deserves much more attention.
America’s global military power has never depended entirely upon American ships.
It depends upon allies.
It depends upon bases.
It depends upon ports.
It depends upon airfields.
It depends upon intelligence sharing, maintenance facilities, fuel supplies and political agreements.
This is why the deterioration of America’s relationships with traditional allies so concerning.
Alliances aren’t simply diplomatic arrangements.
They are part of military logistics.
A friendly port can mean the difference between a ship remaining operational and a ship having to travel thousands of miles home for maintenance.
A friendly airfield can extend the range of military operations.
A partner willing to provide fuel, supplies or repair facilities is effectively contributing to military capability.
So when politicians casually dismiss allies, they should remember that alliances aren’t just about friendship.
They are part of the infrastructure that makes global military power possible.
The question I keep coming back to
So, what does the Abraham Lincoln tell us?
I don’t think it tells us that the US Navy is weak.
It doesn’t.
I don’t think it proves that American personnel aren’t properly trained.
It doesn’t.
And I certainly don’t think it proves that America has somehow lost its military superiority.
What it does tell us is that even the world’s most powerful military has limits.
And those limits become visible when a war lasts longer than expected.
The Lincoln has done an extraordinary job.
But perhaps that is precisely why we should ask why it was required to do such an extraordinary job for so long.
If the original plan anticipated a much shorter operation, what was the contingency plan?
If the conflict was expected to last longer, where was the relief?
If the Navy knew the deployment would be extended, why did the crew have to endure such a prolonged period without a normal port visit?
And if the answer is that circumstances changed, then the next question is the most important of all:
How quickly can America’s military adapt when the war doesn’t follow the plan?
That, is the real test of military power.
Not how many carriers America owns.
Not how many billions it spends.
Not how impressive its weapons look on television.
But whether it can deploy, sustain, repair, relieve and ultimately regenerate its forces while achieving a clearly defined political objective.
The crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln have demonstrated extraordinary endurance.
Now it is time for the politicians and military planners to demonstrate something equally important:
That they had a plan worthy of the people they asked to carry it out.
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