The USS Abraham Lincoln is on its way home after spending many months at sea. It’s coming home because family members of its crew complained about the morale of the sailors and the conditions aboard the ship. Resupplying the ship with food and other necessities became difficult after Iran bombed and closed down American bases across the Middle East.
Hegseth and Trump tried to discount the complaints, but ultimately conceded. That’s why the ship is coming home.
Jason Linkins of The New Republic writes that these events are part of the contempt that Trump has towards the military. He dodged the draft five times, yet he loves to post memes of himself as a general covered with medals. Why do veterans still support him?
Linkins writes:
If you want to get the unfiltered skinny on how the never-ending war with Iran is going, it’s written in the dust. Responsible Statecraft’s Trita Parsi reported this week that U.S. service members marooned in the Persian Gulf have been expressing themselves in messages fingered onto a dusty aircraft flap. The anonymous graffiti, which calls to mind the helmet scrawls of disgruntled soldiers in Vietnam, include “Operation Epstein Fury,” “Peace deal #64 incoming … ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” and “Bibi’s cucks.” Sounds like things aren’t going so well! “I have no frame of reference, I can’t compare it to the sentiments of U.S. soldiers in previous conflicts,” Parsi wrote. “But I suspect these are new sentiments, or at least a new willingness to express them this openly and directly.”
Whether these sentiments are new is indeed unclear, but it’s not without a frame of reference. Trump has always been fairly explicit in his disrespect for the grunts who do most of the work—and all of the dying—in this racket that we call “war.” But only now is a seemingly unwinnable war bringing this all to a head. It’s no longer possible to pretend that the president doesn’t have boundless contempt for U.S. service members. They’re trapped in a war that was essentially kicked off to distract from all the other terrible news the Trump administration generates—or at least to turn attention away from the Epstein files. (Though if these dust etchings are any guide, Trump failed in this attempt to wag the dog.)
In recent weeks, this dynamic has been playing out on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has been on a nine-month deployment to support Trump’s war with Iran. Conditions on board the carrier have deteriorated to the point where some seamen have jumped overboard in an attempt to escape the misery. The crew has, for several weeks, been dealing with food shortages and grotesque sanitation issues. As TNR’s Hafiz Rashid reported, “In recent town hall meetings with military leaders, including acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, things have gotten heated, with family members expressing fear and worry over mental health and the risk of self-harm for the ship’s personnel.”
As it happens, this trouble is not confined to the USS Lincoln: Crews on the USS Benfold, Carl Vinson, and Tripoli have also reported miserable conditions in recent weeks. Pete Hegseth, our self-styled “secretary of war,” has gone to great lengths to downplay and even deny these accounts, characterizing them as misrepresentations while covering up the reason the Lincoln, which is now finally coming home, wasn’t resupplied. The dust scribbles surfaced by Parsi tell a different story.
If anything, the story is an old one. There has always been good reason to question Trump’s respect for U.S. service members. As The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported in September of 2020, Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in Paris, questioning his senior aides as to why he should go to a cemetery full of “losers.” Per Goldberg, “In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.” All of this came about because he didn’t want to get his hair mussed in the rainy conditions. (Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, would later confirm Goldberg’s reporting.)
Trump’s disparagement of the military is pretty consistent. He’s slagged off the armed forces’ top officers as “dopes and babies” and compared them unfavorably to the military leaders he, for whatever reason, holds in high esteem: Adolf Hitler’s generals. He’s complained about having to see disabled veterans at military events, and has advocated for the exclusion of wounded soldiers at official functions because, “Nobody wants to see that.” These kinds of insults were a staple of his first run for office, during which time he mocked Gold Star families and, famously, Vietnam POW survivor John McCain.
But Trump’s disregard is hardly limited to mere aesthetics. As The Huffington Post’s David Wood reported in 2017, Trump’s gigantic military buildup shoveled billions of dollars to the Pentagon, but not much of that kitty ended up benefiting the working grunts who risk their lives on our nation’s behalf.
Only the outlines of Trump’s proposal to lavish money on the military have been drawn up. There’s a request for Congress to add $30 billion to this year’s defense budget and a vague plan to add $54 billion to next year’s spending. Not included in those plans: money for the best infantry weapons, the safest troop-lift helicopters, the most protective lightweight body armor. Instead, grunts will have to settle for budget leftovers with antiquated rifles, helicopters built for their grandfathers during the Vietnam War, and communications gear that is overweight and unreliable.
The least surprising observation you can make about Trump is that he is an asshole and a cheapskate. Still, the president’s Iranian misadventure has fully exposed both his ineptitude as commander in chief and the consequences of this lack of care for military members and their families. As conditions on U.S. ships erode, the administration is finding itself in a media war with the concerned familiesof troops deployed to the region. Stockpiles of vital munitions are being burned through at an alarming rate. And for some reason, Trump has picked this moment to order a bizarre retrofitting of U.S. aircraft carriers, demanding that they be kitted out with obsolete steam catapults. (TNR contributor Brynn Tannehill has the lore drop you need if you’ve been confused by this story.)
Public opinion about the war in Iran has been consistently awful for Trump, whose overall approval hit a low of 33 percent this week. As Parsi reports, those who are stuck on the front lines of this folly are not likely to disabuse their fellow Americans of this being anything but FUBAR. As one service member told him: “What people in the media don’t understand when they compare past conflicts to this one, is this operation has no morale behind it. That makes a world of difference to service members deployed to undesirable locations indefinitely.” Parsi thinks that the only thing left to do now is to “simply end” the war. But Trump is knee-deep in this big muddy, and there truly is no end in sight.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The White House cook is now preparing crow.
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Trump made his actual feelings for the military clear during his first term, before he perfected his fake patriotism act, when he called our service men and women “suckers and losers.” These are the young people without rich daddies. They know the risks and choose to serve. They did not opt to get a pass from a crooked podiatrist for fake bone spurs that netted the conman five draft deferments.
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IT’S NOT JUST the USS Abraham Lincoln: MOST of the U.S. ships on patrol in the Iran war are in sad-to-dire condition. Recall that the USS Benfold, a key guided-missile ship, drifted without propulsion and internal power for four days, during which time it was a sitting duck for Iranian missiles. Inside the ship, the lack of internal power meant that the crew had no working toilets (most U.S. ships don’t have flush toilets and rely on vacuum power to suck waste away), no air conditioning in the cramped quarters below deck, and no way to prepare food for the crew.
And among all the ships on Iran patrol that are in need of repair, the one that’s most likely to fail next is also the most critical in the blockade: The USS Boxer. Boxer is far overdue for a two-year complete overhaul. It was supposed to be in dry dock in San Diego through October of this year, but was instead deployed in March to Iran.
Dry dock overhauls aren’t just like going in for an oil change — the ships are virtually gutted and rebuilt from the inside out because of the tremendous wear and tear on the machinery during deployment at sea. USS Boxer is in sad shape right now and the current photos of the rust all over her hull only hint at that band aids being applied to the equipment inside to keep her somewhat combat ready. Her crew had expected to be on leave with their families during the dry dock period; instead, they just turned around and went to Iran. They and their families are justifiably furious.
Many other U.S. ships and crews are near the breaking point, mechanically and psychologically.
The food situation for the entire fleet in Iranian waters is critical because of TRUMP’S RETREAT that has had nearly zero coverage by U.S. media —
TRUMP RETREATS — The U.S. has been forced by Iran to move resupply operations from Bahrain to Diego Garcia, a U.S. base more than 2,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean, making it more difficult and dangerous to resupply U.S. ships and bases. Some supply lines are even longer than that now.
THE REASON FOR THE RETREAT, just at a time when the difficulties of resupplying U.S. carriers and other ships has made headlines, is because China has armed Iran with a new generation of missiles and drones that can easily penetrate U.S. defenses, and because of the critical shortage of U.S. defensive missiles.
CHINA has declared that “China is A STRONG STRATEGIC PARTNER” of Iran, and “China STRONGLY SUPPORTS IRAN on safeguarding its sovereignty, security, and national dignity.”
So, during the cease-fire, China has supplied Iran with a new generation of missiles and drones that can evade U.S. missiles and electronic countermeasures
Iran’s new missiles from China operate with China’s own “BeiDou” BDS-3/B3A global positioning system (GPS) to guide missiles accurately to hit U.S. and Israeli targets.
The Chinese BDS-3 military-tier B3A system makes U.S. targeting and electronic countermeasures basically useless because “BeiDou” BDS-3/B3A is based on highly-complex frequency-hopping technology and incorporates Navigation Message Authentication (NMA) that prevents “spoofing”.
Before Iran switched to Chinese BDS-3/B3A technology, when Iran fired missiles or sent drones at U.S. bases and ships or at Israel and other nations, the Iranian missiles and drones could be electronically jammed or “spoofed” with false target coordinates.
But, now the U.S. and Israel must rely on old-fashioned radar and fire volleys of large numbers of defensive missiles in the hopes of hitting an incoming Iranian target. THAT’S WHY the U.S. and Israel are depleting their stocks of defensive missiles.
All this information about Iran’s DBS-3/D3A missiles/drone guidance system was available in the Pentagon before Trump’s Iran war, but He-Man Hegseth fired any general who tried to tell him this and tell him that it was a bad idea to launch a war against Iran.
MEANWHILE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan have just signed a mutual defense agreement that LEAVES OUT THE U.S. because Saudi Arabia and Turkey have come to recognize that America’s military can’t defend them and so they have joined with Pakistan, which is a nuclear power and is no friend of America. That spells a BIG LOSS of influence for the United States.
AND NOW desperate Trump is flailing around and attacking U.S. allies — he told Fox News host Trey Yingst that “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them!” Oman has been trying to negotiate a settlement with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, acting on America’s behalf at Trump’s request. The Middle East nations are now all asking who Trump will abandon and target next in his desperation.
PLUS — China has been watching and counting as Hegseth has been stripping defensive missiles from U.S. bases and ships in Asia, to the point that the U.S. Asian bases and ships have barely enough missiles left to defend themselves, let alone challenge China when it invades Taiwan.
AND NOW, Trump has announced that he is withdrawing America’s last supercarrier from Asia and sending it to the Iran war. China must be very pleased.
When China invades Taiwan soon, the entire U.S. economy will crash because U.S. industry — as well as the U.S. defense industry — depends on computer chips made in Taiwan.
This is a disaster that has been caused by Trump thinking that by winning a quick war against Iran, he could distract American voters from his continuing withholding of the Epstein papers.
(Share this strategic information because the public isn’t receiving it from the media.)
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