In a letter to Hegseth and Cao, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, noted that the vessel’s crew members have not been to a port in a record-setting 200-plus days and demanded answers to a series of questions about the crew and the state of the ship.
“There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns, and disruptions in the mail system,” Blumenthal wrote. “These reports warrant immediate attention, but they also raise a broader question: whether the Navy can sustain the operational tempo now being demanded of its carrier force, particularly as this Administration repeatedly commits U.S. forces to conflicts of its own choosing and increasingly relies on aircraft carriers to sustain those operations.”
He also noted that the long deployment of the Lincoln is not an isolated incident, “suggesting that extended deployments may be becoming a feature rather than an exception of the Navy’s force-generation model.” The USS Gerald R. Ford, used for the U.S.’s military operation in Venezuela, spent 326 days at sea before its return in May, Blumenthal wrote, which he noted was “nearly twice the length of a traditional six-month carrier deployment and the longest modern U.S. carrier deployment since the Vietnam era.”
