AND SO IT’S over. The mighty USS Lincoln has turned tail and is limping towards its San Diego base with its malnourished, exhausted and thoroughly demoralised crew of 5,000 sailors. The decision to end the longest at-sea deployment in modern US warfare came only after a land mutiny by the sailors’ families and a public outcry about the conditions they had been forced to endure.

The Lincoln’s retreat is the latest humiliation heaped upon humiliation as the US’s conflict with Iran grinds on with no solution in sight. A week ago, reports that Donald Trump had hidden in a catering truck to evade a possible strike on Air Force One provided Iran with a propaganda dividend that its regime leaders could hardly have imagined; a tsunami of online memes that mocked and taunted the US with images of a fearful and cowering US President crammed into a container of aeroplane food.

Undisclosed Location, United States. 16 August, 2026. The U.S. Navy Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

The cracks within the US military, its ruptured supply chains, rock-bottom morale and abject failures in logistics and planning are on full public display.

So too is the apparent contempt that Trump and Pete Hegseth, his self-styled Secretary of War, have for members of the US military and their families. Trump’s response was a flippant dismissal of claims of dire conditions, adding for good measure that the Lincoln’s nine-month deployment was ‘not nearly long enough.’

Understandably, Trump’s response sparked fury amongst the families of the sailors. It’s not just the rotting food, the overflowing toilets, the contaminated drinking water, the mould-infested showers or the chronic sleep deprivation. Most of the 5,000 seamen aboard the USS Lincoln are on the lower rungs of the military totem pole. They work 12 to 14-hour days, seven days a week, for a basic salary that works out to around $6 an hour, lower than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. There is no overtime and no days off.

Undisclosed Location, United States. 14 August, 2026. Sailors signal a F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter aircraft to prepare for launch on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham........

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