Working-class families, including the young men and women in uniform in the U.S., just got a stark lesson in how little the capitalist rulers here are concerned about the well-being of its troops. For the ruling families, they’re just cannon fodder for their inevitable wars over profit and plunder.
Soon after the USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego with its crew of 5,000 sailors in November 2025 for what was expected to be a routine Pacific deployment, the ship was suddenly redirected to the Middle East. It became part of Washington’s “Operation Epic Fury,” a bombing campaign against the Iranian people in the ongoing conflict over control of crucial oil trade routes in the region. The Lincoln ended up stationed there for more than seven months, until reports of fed up sailors contemplating jumping overboard hit the press.
While U.S. carriers typically pull into port every 30-45 days to allow for stock replenishment, maintenance and rest for the crew, the sailors aboard the Lincoln had been deployed for a record-breaking 286 days.
They told their families they endured food and water shortages, frequent loss of mail service with their families and long workdays with little time off. This meant sleeping for months on metal bunks stacked three high in cramped compartments shared with dozens of people. Only 20 inches below the bed above, sailors in the lower and middle bunks often refer to those spaces as “coffin lockers.”
“My son is currently on that ship and listening to him say that he and his shipmates constantly think about jumping off the ship just for relief is so hard to listen to,” one worried parent wrote to Stars and Stripes in July. Editorial control of the paper had been taken over directly by the renamed Department of War in January, it said, to better focus on “war fighting.”
Up and down the military chain of command, those responsible have dismissed the sailors’ hardships out of hand, saying a little discomfort is just part of the “job” in the military.
“First-time sailors are going to complain about the food, the living conditions, similar to sending kids off to college for the first time,” Dan Keeler, the ship’s captain, casually told the Guardian.
Describing the women and men on board as if they were little more than machines, Brad Cooper, commander of the U.S. Central Command, said Lincoln’s crew “is tired, but they continue to fire on all cylinders.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the ship’s conditions were “completely misrepresented,” while President Donald Trump callously declared its deployment was “not nearly long enough.” And for the Democrats, it was just a short-term election issue.
Meanwhile a spokesperson for the Navy says it’s looking to adjust the ship’s “available spaces” to allow the crew “to remain self-sufficient for longer periods, especially when resupply may be difficult.”
Our fellow workers on the job, as well as their sons and daughters who find themselves in the military, face the same need to defend our class interests against capitalist exploitation and abuse.
They deserve to be properly and thoroughly trained in the military arts, not just thrown into combat. Their training, like learning your job in the workplace, should come under the control of the unions.
These questions will become increasingly important as today’s deepening conflicts between profit-driven capitalist rulers over resources, markets and labor power continue to sharpen.