The catastrophic situation aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is yet another sign of the inexorable decline of the Yankee Empire. Below are two articles by veterans of the anti-imperialist struggle
John Catalinotto, workers world, August 18, 2026
August 16 — Major U.S. media have delivered the news of a collapsing supply line to the U.S. war fleet in the West Asia region. Thousands of personnel on aircraft carriers and other warships in the region have experienced exhausting working conditions, threats to safety on deck, a lack of supplies, food shortages, water contamination and disruptions in the mail system.
That’s according to their relatives, who showed their anger at an Aug. 7 virtual town hall meeting with top U.S. Navy officers in San Diego. MS NOW reported the discussions, which were then reproduced in military newspapers, in the Guardian and later in the New York Times and other media.
Pentagon spokesperson Vice Admiral Douglas Verissimo blamed Iran’s knocking out the U.S. naval base in Bahrain, a logistics hub, for the inability to deliver mail and supplies.
Conditions on the ships have led to mental health crises, with little to no counseling available, and to attempted suicides, which even the corporate media have reported.
The extensive news coverage of the deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln nuclear-powered aircraft carrier has shone a spotlight on a broad change in attitude at least among the enlisted personnel (non-officers). It’s what the Naval leadership describes as “demoralization.”
Often in military history what appears as demoralization is the first step to a greater consciousness. This is a consciousness that the people giving you orders and determining your life are acting neither in your interest nor for some ideal, but to serve the interests of the ultrarich who rule society.
At least some of the flight deck personnel are aware that a growing proportion of people in the U.S. consider the work of the USS Lincoln to constitute war crimes. A half-dozen military veterans in the U.S. Congress last December told the world that U.S. military personnel have not only the right but the duty to disobey orders to commit these war crimes.
The first step to the change in consciousness on the USS Lincoln comes after more than nine months on a combat mission with no time on land. There are 5,000 personnel on the Lincoln, and the enlisted personnel on the flight deck are mostly between 18 and 22 years old. They often work 16-hour shifts. The ship is like a giant factory, which after nine months at sea must seem like a prison.
It’s no wonder some Navy personnel are “demoralized.” It’s no wonder some have attempted suicide. It’s even less of a surprise that many of their relatives are mad as hell at the Navy top bosses.
And it wouldn’t be hard to imagine they all are furious at the MAGA commander in chief and his sycophant at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth. Both swept aside the relatives’ concerns. They treated the sailors and their relatives as useful cannon fodder. And unlike most U.S. governments in the recent past, they did it with open arrogance.
Given this rapid expansion of the struggle, the antiwar and anti-imperialist movement must consider how to respond to the new challenge. What can the movement do to help the relatives get their message out to the people? What can be done to make sure the military rank and file remain in contact with their relatives and with the people of the U.S.?
Organizations like Veterans For Peace have publicized the right of people in the military to refuse to obey illegal and unconstitutional orders, like orders to commit war crimes. They have reached out by placing billboards near many bases around the U.S. and the world. Other groups have offered legal counseling. All this is good.
But the movement must take into account what is behind the corporate media reports on the failures of the MAGA administration. The media criticism reflects a struggle among different sectors of the rulers of U.S. society: Many consider the MAGA regime incompetent to defend and expand U.S. imperialist interests. While this struggle creates a temporary opening, the movement must encourage resistance independent of both ruling factions.
Can the movement also promote the idea that rank-and-file personnel in the U.S. Armed Forces have the right to form their own organization, much as workers would form a labor union?
Can the movement demand that the military personnel and their relatives have access to media of all types and have the right to report on and express their opinions on what is happening to them?
The actual form of any organization of active-duty personnel will have to grow from their own needs and reflect their own demands, but the movement can begin to find ways to provide support. Antiwar veterans of prior U.S. wars of aggression — against Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, for example — can play a valuable role in this work, as they have already begun to do.
John Catalinotto: Born in 1940 in New York City, where he lives and teaches mathematics at City University, John Catalinotto was a civilian organizer for the anti-war, anti-racist American Servicemen’s Union during the U.S. war against Vietnam. Since 1982 he has been editor of the weekly magazine Workers World and was the lead organizer for the International Action Center (headed by Ramsey Clark) of the Yugoslavia Tribunal (June 2000) and the Iraq Tribunal (August 2004). He is a contributor to the Portuguese newspapers Avante and odiario.info and the Galician newspaper Terra e Tempo. He has edited two books: Metal of Dishonor on depleted uranium (1997) and Hidden Agenda: the U.S.-NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia (2002). In 2017 he published “Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolutions,” about soldier revolts from 1917 Russia to the U.S. of the Vietnam War. His first novel, “Cold War: A Love Story“, was published in 2022.Member of Tlaxcala. @workersworld
Col. Ann Wright (retired), Consortium News, August 14, 2026
Rotten food, overflowing toilets into bunking areas, no room in the incoming missile shelters, confiscated cellphones that are the notification devices for incoming missiles, infrequent mail, social media closed down: these were some of the issues that military families identified at the Aug. 6 national conference of Veterans For Peace.
Spouses and parents of Air Force, Army, Marine and Navy members and members of Military Families Speak Out told of plummeting morale, lack of basic supplies and attacks on U.S. military bases that are not reported in the U.S. media.
These frustrations echoed those of military families who met with senior military officials to describe conditions on U.S. military bases in the Middle East that are coming under attack from Iran in response to the brutal U.S.-Israeli five-month offensive.
On Aug. 6, the Navy’s senior leadership held listening sessions with the families of aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln’s sailors — one in-person session in San Diego, and a second online session later the same evening, according to The Maritime Executive. Family members leaked recordings of those sessions to MS NOW that described conditions aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln: showers plagued with stubborn mildew, flagging morale, heavy fatigue, shortages of supplies and food, contaminated water supplies and lost mail.
Since departing from Naval Base San Diego on Nov. 21, 2025, the USS Abraham Lincoln and its crew of 5,000 sailors and Marines has been deployed more than 250 days, with only a stop in Guam in December and a brief visit in Oman in June after 208 days at sea.
A second aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, had similar problems when it sailed from the Caribbean to the Middle East after being off Venezuela in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in January.
During that deployment, the ship’s toilets kept failing, with sewage often overflowing and spilling onto the floor. Additionally, a fire broke out in the laundry room, causing enough damage that the Ford went into a port on the Greek island of Crete for repairs.
More than 200 sailors on the Ford were treated for smoke inhalation according to USNI News, “with one sailor medically evacuated from the carrier after being injured in the damage control effort. Two others were treated for lacerations. The smoke damage from the laundry-room fire extended to the berthing.” More than 100 bunks and personal gear were destroyed in the fire.
Articles in Stars and Stripes and the Navy Times detail at least six attempts by crew members to jump overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln, with interviews conducted with sailors and families of those on board who described the impacts of the lengthy deployment.
Jefferson Kelley, the father of a USS Abraham Lincoln sailor, wrote to his U.S. senator, Bernie Moreno, asking Moreno to make an official inquiry to the U.S. Navy to see if he could do a “parent swap” with his son, Jackson, 20, due to the terrible conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Kelley said he had not been asked by his son to make the swap, but he had read of the conditions on the aircraft carrier that included food rations, safety concerns, water contamination and poor mental health, which has purportedly led to some sailors attempting to jump overboard during the 250 days at sea and felt that he as a parent should share the burden.
Families of U.S. ground forces on the U.S. military bases scattered all over the Middle East describe extreme overcrowding in shelters for incoming missile attacks.
According to the news outlet War Horse, the only public source for injuries during the U.S. attack on Iran is the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which provides monthly totals for the war on Iran with limited demographic data.
More than 400 casualties (non lethal) were recorded from Feb. 28 and April 8 due to the U.S. attack on Iran, War Horse reports, adding:
“More than 270 of the roughly non-lethal 400 casualties were Army soldiers, and about one-third of those were reservists. Enlisted soldiers accounted for most Army casualties, including 57 sergeants and 53 specialists. But also wounded were 64 Army officers, including 20 captains and 13 lieutenant colonels or colonels. …
“The Navy reported 64 casualties, none of whom were classified as seriously injured. The Air Force recorded 51 casualties, and the Marine Corps recorded 19. Unlike the Army, the other branches did not list the type or cause of injury. …
“U.S. troops suffered shrapnel wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation and other injuries. But one category appeared far more often than any other: head trauma. …
“At least 170 troops sustained head trauma between the start of the war to early April, according to the data.”
Some military health experts, according to War Horse, worry that the large portion of the wounded suffering from traumatic brain injuries — caused by damage to the brain that can impact thinking, movement and emotion — could become the signature injury of this war, as in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has attempted to reduce the accounting on the number of U.S. military killed and wounded in the war on Iran by separating those killed/wounded before the May 1 ceasefire and after.
In a total accounting, from before and after the ceasefire, 18 U.S, troops have been killed and 624 wounded since the U.S. began its war against Iran on Feb. 28.
The U.S. Congress is finally getting involved. On Aug. 12, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Armed Services Committee, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao to express “serious concern” about the increasing length of deployments and demand answers about living conditions aboard the carrier.
“There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns,” aboard the ship, he said in the letter, as well as “disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”
Blumenthal’s letter ends with six questions for Hegseth and Department of Defense to answer concerning conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln and a call to treat servicewomen and men properly:
“The men and women aboard the Lincoln have answered the call to serve their country. The Department owes them not only adequate supplies, maintenance, and support during this deployment, but a sustainable force-generation model that does not rely on repeatedly extending sailors and ships to meet persistent operational demands.
“Our servicemembers deserve nothing less than the full support of their government — and the American people deserve a military strategy that is worthy of the sacrifices we ask them to make.”
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