Hell at sea off Oman: "Not nearly long enough"

Join the Navy and see the world, isn’t that the saying?

The men on the USS Abraham Lincoln have seen mostly “steel beach”, enduring cramped quarters, bad food and risky days, for the longest seaborne U.S. naval deployment ever. But Donald J. Trump is choking so hard on his war of choice with Iran boondoggle that he yapped to reporters that the extended stretch miserable and at risk is “not nearly long enough”.

The Military Times reported Tuesday that at least two sailors have attempted to jump overboard. The wife of one sailor said burnout caused her husband to do so.

Fueled by the pain and outrage from the service members’ families, Democrats and non-partisan humanitarians of all stripes are rising to protest.

So first, let’s grant all honor to the sailors aboard the Lincoln. May the long-overdue relief said to be finally steaming their way bring them surcease from their health-and-spirit-wrecking stasis. Their entrapment has been a bitter consequence coming in service of a demented commander in chief's bad bet.

Late Sunday afternoon came a visit to the boat by Centcom commander Admiral Brad Cooper, who offered some freeze-dried praise to the crew and stated relief was coming. He offered few details but it seems the carrier George Washington is tasked to arrive in a couple weeks; then, at last some three weeks back to their San Diego home port.

This post will look at their plight from three perspectives:

--the growing (and growingly outraged) reportage and plight of the men, women and families entrapped in this oceanic twilight zone. This extreme scenario never had to be.

--some thoughts, laced in throughout the below text, from a profoundly experienced, observant, and articulate former carrier aviator Ward Carroll. Ward’s got a robust You Tube following who look for his almost unmatchably sourced “deep intel” on matters military., He also has a popular stack of novels on flyboy life:

In a different life, we might have met around a stack of Marshall amps for a Rolling Stone feature on his rock band. (Check him out on You Tube playing alongside Steve Morse of Dixie Dregs and Deep Purple. Recommended peak -Cream banger is “White Room” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHJc0LzccoQ&t=702s

--the third perspective is from my own underqualified self; my acquaintance with Ward began when I did a piece for Rolling Stone on the real-life naval aviators who populated “Top Gun”--the kind of jet jockeys who rode F-14’s into combat in the Gulf and elsewhere. Here I must nod to Dave (call sign: Hey Joe) Parsons, my kindly, sharp guide to that life. He’s a guy who, like Ward, flew many missions from the back seat of the two-man fighters. That job is identified as being a RIO (or Radar Intercept Officer, handling weapons, navigation and electronic tasks); think Anthony Edwards as Goose in the movie.

Despite boasting only the faintest whiff of authenticity myself as regards the actual life and risk-laden skills of these aviators, I’ll ask for your patience in recounting my own minor adventure. I spent about a week on either coast in the company of these folks—great guys all—and had my “hop” in an F-14 back seat out of Miramar Naval Air Station, plus several days at sea in and on the behemoth , aging Kitty Hawk class carrier, the America.

I even touched– lurched?-down on a flight deck of that mighty war weapon, but before I try to brag on that, just know—well, I’ll tell you:

Landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier isn’t as hair raising as you might think, as I discovered for myself one day in the summer of 1996 when the airship bearing me, along with some mail sacks and boxed-up spare parts, set down without much fuss on the deck of the USS America.

My sole protective accessory was what’s called cranial, which sounds more like an injury than a helmet but my air excursion from Naval Air Station Oceana to the boat was exceedingly low drama. In the fairly listless water state of the Atlantic Ocean off Norfolk on that day, no hostile threats felt near. (Though soon enough I’d be in a squadron ready room watching Russian Bear bombers grumbling through distant skies on a glitchy monitor, even as they were tracked in real time lumbering on a typical transcontinental milk run from their homeland to client state Cuba.)

It's interesting to note that the F-14’s that went airborne from the America that day were picking up the tracking job that began roughly in the North Atlantic with allied nations’ surveillance jet squadrons. They then handed the task to the Canadian air wings, until U.S. aviators shadowed them down and through our carriers patch of Atlantic coast air apace as the Bears grumbled on south.

I'll drop a squib here re the later hop, with an account and my time on the boat, but in a future post I‘ll add the full story for paid subscribers. (Spoiler: no, Ididn't lose lunch.)

Just to acknowledge what’s going on in the picture here, that’s minutes before we strpped in for an hour or so of cray-cray maneuvers. Thus you see me on the right with a giddy rictus; the relaxed gent to the left in Lt. Commander Randy Clark, then head of the training squadron at NAS Miramar.

Known to his cadre bu his call sign Pogo, he was deep into what was heading for 10,000 hours in flight. He'd started as a 16-year-old runaway, flying everything from puddle jumpers in Latin America to Army scout planes in Vietnam. (The latter pursuit included hostile downings--"the enemy takes a very dim view of being found”– and a couple Bronze Stars.

So yes, Pogo makes for a hell of a story, but the hop with Randy was still a month in the future, and the goal here is to address today’s topic of life on the carrier.

For my flight from mudflats of Oceana naval air station to the America, our aircraft was a twin-prop rpope ugly ducklong called a COD (Carrier On Board Delivery), which, as the big jets do, “caught at wire” (with much less speed, weight, speed and drama than them) to jerk to a halt.

Hey Joe was there to greet me—he and his mateys from the 102 squadron, The Diamondbacks, had flown in earlier—and soon I was being escorted to my quarters. To that cohort, and even as portrayed in a cartoon that week in the base newspaper, it was quite amusing that some guy from Rolling Stone was aboard at all, and even more amusingly, being lodged in the temporarily vacated quarters of a handler and…his dope-sniffing canine.

On the deck during flight ops, as my story quoted one aviator, there are “a thousand ways to die in a heartbeat”; but before that opportunity came some luncheon sliders with the welcoming air and operations “bosses”. (This we washed down with bug juice faintly tasting of jet fuel. (A negligible taste of what the Lincoln crew has been undergoing).

When it came time around dusk to observe “carrier qual’s”, I was escorted across the busy deck by some impressively focused deckhands clad in yellow, green and other specialty-signifying shirt colors, through the whine and hum and air blast hisses, the squawks and thumps, of a series of launches.

There’s was an almost absurd routinization to what was happening as the giant flying machines stood knock-kneed at the catapults (nose down to lessen wind resistance) and w re flung with a great noise and jet blast down the seemingly too-short deck to dip, briefly, then blaze on away.

But impressive as all that was, the most brain-busting evolution would come at nightfall with the “traps”, which is almost too modulated a word for “arresting”, by wire, twenty-plus tons of still- urging-at-peak-power airplane. I would observe this from a position immediately adjacent to the deck, my head poking up as if in search of a guillotine, with the Landing Signal Officer standing a foot or two nearer to doom than me.

Critter, as my new LSO friend was called, was cordial and calm almost to a fault as he showed me our `out’ —a square space about, oh, two desperate men wide, with a belly of thickly braided and knotted rope. I was given to understand that if a decapitating, spark-shedding , jet-blasting, (did I note decapitating?) machine should come our way, the best recourse would be to plunge in rather a hurry into the ropes. It was both logical and insane—as Scott Jennings likes to postulate while squabbling to defend Trump as an actual human on “Newsnight”, two things can be true at once.

Which brings us to Trump’s reliably moronic and uninformed, humanity-free policies as to how America can weasel out of this terrible war that seems dammed not simply to fail, but to sink America’s reputation and hopes for some sort of democratic global hegemony.

Having lived through some decades of highs and lows in America’s readiness, and as a thinker on global warfare and politics in steady touches with sources anonymous and otherwise, Ward Carroll seemed to be the right man to address the current mess that centers, in public discussions, on the miseries aboard the Lincoln.

In your heyday deploying, the fleet readiness was pretty near its peak, no?

You know, in those days, we had 15 carrier battle groups. We now would call them strike groups…I never had a deployment that was any longer than six and a half months, and any extensions were by exception. What made that doable was the mass of 15 carrier strike groups, that gives you six to seven to deploy at any given time, Desert Storm was the acid test of that, right? We had six and [later] seven on station.

Nobody was deployed for more than six months, maybe seven months, during even Desert Storm. Okay, so now from that point till now, it's been this slow descent and erosion of shipbuilding capability. Take the Navy's disjointed shipbuilding plans over the years, you throw in COVID and other things, and of a sudden you're like, oh, we only have 11 aircraft carriers.

You’ve detailed before that the top-level structure and leadership had enforced a more livable deployment regime for the sailors.

As Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman codified that into law, because he was one of the boys. You know, he's a Reserve A6 [attack aircraft] bombardier navigator. He loved to hang at the club. He gave us all kinds of quality of life stuff. Because he was a guy who understood, how do you make it fun while doing the job right, and how do you retain the best among us?

Now we’ve got Hegseth talking all about how he loves our warfighters and yet he’s leaving them vulnerable, and with shattered morale…

You always had something emotionally to look forward to. What I can relate to here, it seriously does kind of break my heart because I know what they're going through, but their situation is mine on steroids.

Long story short, our extension wound up being two weeks, two weeks of this churn, then we go home, right? They've had three months, and there's no end in sight against a war deployment where they've been to just two places, Guam and Oman. This is the worst.

The Navy likes to talk about this thing called resilience, which is a nice clean term for sailor mental state, And suicide rates have always been a problem, and since the global war on terror, these op tempos that we have--this is really the worst possible circumstance in terms of this this crucible, right?

And you’ve pointed out on your podcast no major build-up is coming quickly.

Because this is a lesson in, again, it basically takes 11 carriers in all to make three [operational]. Much like, it took 15 to make seven back in our day, takes 11 to make three now. Okay, so the lesson, the underlying thesis here is we need more aircraft carriers, but there's no chance it's ever going to happen in our lifetime.

The Trump administration is willing to throw money at the problem, but we don't have the capacity to build more carriers, even if we wanted to., We have the capacity to build more submarines; we have barely the capacity to build more airplanes. So what happens when you put your knife in the teeth, like Pete Hegseth, whom I've known forever?

He was on my podcast back when he was mis-managing his first not-for-profit ,and the right-wing narrative among the vet space—that “hey, if we just try in Afghanistan, we can win”. So I had him on the podcast. I talked to him in person at the DNC in Denver in 2008, asking vets from all stripes, what would you think about an Obama presidency?

Tthat he didn't like it at all, as you might imagine. But this is way before, you know, `We the people’ on his forearm and his Knight’s Cross and Fox News, not to mention MAGA. If you had told me at that time this guy is going to be the Secretary of of Defense, no--Secretary of War, I would have said, no fucking way.

I mean, he was sharp, an Ivy League pretty boy, had just enough of a military pedigree to be credible, right? Okay, and Trump Phase Two is that he’s surrounded himself so there's no adults in the room. No Mattis, no Kelly, no McMasters, right? Now it's just these clowns who've driven the boat into the into those seawall.

When you do this tough guy talk, and you're all “warrior ethos” and “No more of this” and bumper stickers and cosplaying, working out with the troops, then you don't understand what the other shoe dropping is. So this case is the poster child for how you can break an aircraft carrier for life.

Then you have his crackpot ideas about moving the control centers forward as they were in the old days, even though that jumbles what works for the aviators and the entire carrier mission. Then add in his love for steam catapults over the newer electro-magnetic ones--pure horseshit nostalgia.

Trump just threw out this edict this because this this steam versus EMALS (electronic catapults) thing is a bone he won’t let go of. What you're seeing in Lincoln is a bellwether of the future. Absolutely. We don't have any more carriers, And we don't have any more people, so the only variable that you can adjust here is you've got to stop committing to never-ending wars.

Including the current one which is causing a dangerous depletion of both defensive and offensive resources?

The missile inventories issue is real at a strategic level, and it's a two or three-year problem to get back to where we were. China and Russia are paying attention. Russia knows they can take Ukraine now. China is thinking about, “Why don't we just go ahead and do that Xi thing, and take Taiwan now instead of 2027?”

And guess what? We're we can't do we can't defend either country. We cannot, not to mention, I don't think we have the will with this administration. The world order has already shifted, but it's going to shift tectonically in the next five years, because of these misadventures by this administration that believes that they're doing things that will fix the world order.

I think we're doomed in terms of this administration effecting anything productive, and the worst part is under the auspices of fixing the military, they are breaking the military,. And that is abou man power. You're going to see a retention crisis of the highest order. We've broken our ships. We're going to break our airplanes that are on those ships, and also NATO partners, Arab partners, global commerce. All we've done is facilitate a new world order for our peer enemies.

In summary, do you feel the best impact you can have is to keep up the deep reportage and insight no matter how oblivious this empire of scams and confusion?

Yes--when they're just doing this performance art and these loyalty tests in front of this guy who's wildly narcissistic and disingenuous, and just a warped human being, it starts to get pretty disgusting. And using the military, as prop, is something I can't abide. So, insofar as I can be subversive on my You Tube channel through the sober presentation of fact, I will.

Ward Carroll’s You Tube channel is highly recommended:

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