Nearly 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln went without basic supplies — including toothpaste, deodorant and soap — at points during the ship’s grueling nine-month deployment. The shortages have been the subject of weeks of reporting and family accounts.
Less widely understood is why the shortages happened: The war with Iran left a Navy base in Bahrain damaged and the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous to use, forcing the Navy to resupply the ship from an island in the Indian Ocean more than 2,200 miles away, according to current and former Navy leaders
“The net result is that replenishment ships now have to travel more than three times as far to pick up supplies from ashore,” Thane Clare, a retired Navy captain, told MS NOW. “In practical terms, a transit from Bahrain to the Gulf of Oman at 16 knots takes about one-and-a-half days. The trip from Diego Garcia, on the other hand, takes about five days. Accounting for round trips to pick up more supplies, a replenishment ship that could have resupplied Lincoln once every three days can now replenish Lincoln only once every 10 days.”
That detour is at the center of a standoff between Navy families and the Trump administration over what conditions aboard the Lincoln actually look like for U.S. service members.
“We didn’t plan for this war; we just did it sort of on the fly,” said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy commander who worked in naval operations and is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, that has supported military interventionism. “And when you fight a war as a pickup game, this is the kind of stuff that happens.”
How Bahrain lost its role
Since 1997, Naval Support Activity Bahrain has served as the Navy’s Fifth Fleet logistical headquarters, providing operational support to Navy ships in the region. In the days following joint strikes launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran in February, a satellite image as reviewed by the AP — which has not been independently confirmed by MS NOW — revealed Iranian missiles damaged the base. The Pentagon has yet to publicly confirm any damage, but Naval leadership acknowledged to family members of Lincoln crew members that the base could no longer be used for resupply purposes.
With the base compromised and the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous for cargo ships to transit, the Navy’s most viable alternative was utilizing Diego Garcia, a British military base on an island in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia is roughly 2,200 miles from the Gulf of Oman, where the Lincoln was stationed, and that distance meant a major delay in critical items, like food and hygiene products, and in care packages from service members’ loved ones back home. Many families have reported that packages that they shipped in January didn’t reach the ship for up to four months later.
Conflicting accounts
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has disputed that the Lincoln experienced any supply issues. “We make sure every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment,” Hegseth said last week.
Vice Adm. Douglas Verissimo, commander of Naval Air Forces for the Pacific Fleet, where the Lincoln is based, offered a different account at an Aug. 6 virtual town hall with roughly 200 Lincoln family members. He acknowledged issues with supplies and mail. “It’s getting better, it’s still not good, and it was extremely bad for a little while,” he said, according to audio and video recordings of the virtual meeting reviewed by MS NOW. “But we are — we are, as a nation — doing the best we can.”
He also acknowledged that the Navy hadn’t anticipated losing Bahrain as a logistics hub. Once the Navy worked through the backlog of items “stuck” there, he said, they prioritized food, then items for the ship’s store and finally mail, according to the recordings.
Following a wave of reporting on conditions aboard the Lincoln — and mounting pressure from lawmakers seeking answers from the Pentagon — the ship’s social media pages have posted content addressing many of the concerns about food, supply, morale and maintenance. On Aug. 17, the ship’s official Facebook page posted that the Lincoln had conducted 54 “replenishments at sea” with nine Navy Military Sealift Command ships for a total of 140 hours, receiving more than 20 million gallons of fuel, 10,261 pallets of food, parts and materials, and 2,103 triwalls of mail.
Mark Bowmer, a retired Navy Supply Corps captain, said that the number of replenishments could be misleading without knowing how often they occurred. “You don’t know the distribution, particularly since the Lincoln came out of the Pacific, so they may have been doing more frequent resupply when they’re closer to Japan,” he told MS NOW. “And then … as they moved west to CENTCOM, it would have decreased.”
Why Diego Garcia was the Navy’s best option
Former senior Navy leaders say the resupply issue wasn’t just a result of the Bahrain base being attacked.
Clark, the retired Navy commander now at the Hudson Institute, told MS NOW that the Navy also uses Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait as resupply ports in the Middle East, but many cargo ships couldn’t easily transit in the region because of the ongoing hostilities from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“It’s not just the fact that Bahrain got attacked,” said Clark. “It’s the fact that we can’t risk sending cargo ships up and down the Strait of Hormuz because the Iranians are attacking shipping. So, the Navy doesn’t want to be open about the fact that we can’t control the Strait of Hormuz therefore, we cannot use the Strait of Hormuz to move shipping up into places where we could get resupplied.”
Clark said the next logical options were Diego Garcia or routing supplies through the Mediterranean, but because the Iran-backed Houthi forces threatened to attack shipping in the Red Sea, that left Diego Garcia as the only plausible option. Other ports in the Persian Gulf were also within striking distance of Iranian missiles, taking them out of the equation as a back-up to Bahrain according to Thane Clare, the retired Navy captain.
While Diego Garcia’s remoteness makes it difficult for Iran to strike, the distance delayed supplies from reaching the aircraft carrier but also slowed the process of getting supplies to the island in the first place. One former Navy officer, granted anonymity to address a sensitive issue, said they heard from current officers that much of the dry food that was being sent to the Lincoln was being shipped from as far away as U.S. military bases in Hawaii, meaning supplies would make a nearly 9,000 mile-long journey to the Lincoln, an abnormally long route compared to normal deployments. Former senior Navy officers also noted that given its smaller size, Diego Garcia lacks the capacity to resupply two carrier strike groups: It was designed to support much smaller-scale deployments, since most of the supplies that are brought there have been delivered by air.
The ripple effects
Brent Sadler, a retired Navy captain and senior research fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that while aircraft carriers typically get their mail delivered by an aircraft that can land on the ship’s flight deck, that aircraft is not large enough to deliver necessities like food and toiletries for a 5,000-person crew.
“You’re not going to resupply a ship with a crew of 5,000 with fresh vegetables and stuff like that with that kind of aircraft,” Sadler said. “It’s not, not typically done. And it would be pretty surprising if they did, because there would be a lot of flight hours and a lot of moving between shore and land.”
Sadler also noted that the evacuation of nearly 1,500 non-essential personnel from the Bahrain base, when Iranian missiles struck it at the beginning of the war, could have affected the contractors and local workers the military relies on to source food and supplies for the ship.
The Lincoln’s modern-day Navy record for most continuous days at sea — 208 — also exacerbated the supply issue. Normally, carriers can pick up much larger quantities of food, supplies and tools when they hit a port. “You load as much supplies as the time avails,” Sadler said. “So, you might get a reload of fresh fruit and fresh vegetables, and that’s, that’s perhaps the easiest way to move and replenish.”
Bowmer, the retired Navy Supply Corps captain, said that if supply issues were bad on the Lincoln, they were likely worse on the three destroyers accompanying it, which have less storage space and capacity for food and other products. While aircraft carriers can typically store up to 90 days’ worth of food, Bowmer said that destroyers can only hold about half that — meaning they need to be resupplied every 45 days. Further, sourcing toiletries is “a lot more difficult” than food, which “is a little more predictable,” Bowmer said.
A problem years in the making
Retired Vice Adm. Robert Harward, now executive vice president at Shield AI, said that part of the supply problem stems from not having allocated enough resources to the Middle East, since previous national security and defense strategies prioritized the Pacific theater.
“We need to shift gears and recognize that this is a long-term commitment,” Harward said. “We need to rebalance our global force posture to prepare for this long-term presence in CENTCOM — which we should have been doing for the last 40 years.”
Bowmer echoed that sentiment. “A lot of inventory held in theater is based off of historical demand, and for years we were preparing for, you know, the China fight,” Bowmer said. “We haven’t been consistently operating in Fifth Fleet for a while.”
Ultimately, former senior Navy leaders say the logistics issues stem from a failure to plan for what has become a much longer military presence than the administration anticipated.
“There’s different ways to approach contested logistics, but one, you have to recognize it’s contested logistics, and two, you have to practice and prepare for it,” Bowmer said. “And it looks like they did not practice and prepare for it.”
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