Logistics, Bro

The source of the Lincoln’s issues are problems with the broader supply chain to the Middle East:

At the war’s outset, Keir Starmer, then the British prime minister, denied the Pentagon access to Diego Garcia for use in the operation against Iran. That decision drew Mr. Trump’s ire, and Mr. Starmer ultimately relented on March 1, granting the U.S. military access to the island for what he described as a “specific and limited defensive purpose.”

A U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive logistics, said the Navy began using Diego Garcia as the main shipment point shortly after the Navy’s base in Bahrain was heavily damaged.

The use of Diego Garcia as the Navy’s new logistics hub may explain why Iran fired two medium-range ballistic missiles at the island on March 20.

One of the missiles fell into the Indian Ocean short of its target. A Navy warship shot down the other.

The San Diego-based Lincoln has been at sea for nearly nine months without what the Navy calls a “liberty port” — where sailors can get off the ship for a few days.

Bahrain is one of the two ports where U.S. aircraft carriers in the region have typically moored so their crews can get some downtime. The other, the Emirati port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, is also well within the range of Iranian missiles.

The Pentagon’s system of transport and logistics is far and away the finest of its kind (it is commonly said that the US can deploy troops anywhere in the world in 24 hours and have them supplied with lobster dinners when they arrive) but no system is immune from the tyranny of distance and physics. Moreover, modern sailors and soldiers are capable of things that there forebears could only have dreamed, but modern Americans have different expectations of comfort from sailors in World War II or the Barbary Wars. Testosterone injections don’t solve these problems, and war planning must keep these facts in mind. Some thoughts at the AP:

The Ford had experienced a fire in a laundry space that forced the carrier to turn around and return to the Mediterranean Sea for repairs and left hundreds of sailors without places to sleep. Meanwhile, the Lincoln has spent a record uninterrupted time at sea of more than 240 days. Democratic lawmakers have been calling for investigations and greater visibility into conditions aboard the ship.

Warships and their crews can only handle so much, said Robert Farley, who teaches national security and diplomacy at the University of Kentucky and often writes about aircraft carriers.

“People don’t get enough rest. It’s psychologically exhausting. And R&R is part of keeping the crew healthy,” Farley said. “Sometimes it’s framed as, ‘These people haven’t had a vacation.’ But we are dealing with well-known limits on the capacity of a crew to operate at top efficiency over time. And that just declines.”