by Monica Duffy Toft, Tufts University, [This article first appeared in The Conversation, republished with permission]
Reports from the USS Abraham Lincoln describe a crew running on almost no sleep and suffering mental strain.
The Navy’s own account acknowledged that the Lincoln spent 266 days deployed, 200 of them in a combat zone. It said that meal plans were adjusted when fresh resupply was unavailable, and that its sailors and Marines had been “pushed to their limits.”
The instinct may be to pity the soldiers, but I believe pity misses the point. The question is not whether we should ask hard things of people who volunteered for hard things. It is whether what the Department of Defense asked them to do was necessary and worth the military readiness – the ability to complete missions and respond to threats – it has consumed.
I know something about this. When I served in the U.S. Army, I worked three consecutive 12-hour day shifts, had three days off, then worked three nights. My husband was on a different rotation – six days on followed by two days off. We did not think we were being wronged. We were soldiers, and that was the job.
‘An overstretched force’
In February 2026, alongside Israel, the Trump administration chose to engage in war with Iran. The administration did not choose it blind.
Days before the conflict began, President Donald Trump was warned that the war might produce a harder-line Iranian leadership more determined to build a nuclear bomb. He was informed that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz and that a prolonged war would draw down stocks of precision-guided munitions. Military leaders also expressed concerns about “readiness problems for an overstretched force.”
This is where operational tempo – the pace and duration at which military units operate and the time they receive to recover in between – stops being a personnel statistic and becomes a strategic one. A higher tempo means units don’t have time to recover, since deployments tend to get extended.
This is not just a Navy problem.
In May 2025, an Army sergeant major warned that the Army’s operational tempo had surpassed the demands of the war on terror after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He said it was threatening readiness, retention, physical and mental health, and family stability. Two years earlier, another sergeant major said that soldiers were “busier now than we ever have been.”
Degrading conditions
The Iran war did not begin with a rested force or a readiness account at zero. It landed on a joint force that was already running hot.
The military rotation cycle is a planned schedule that moves military personnel between training, assignments and rest at home to prevent burnout. It exists because readiness is a finite reserve, which gets spent whether or not the war was necessary.
Ships and aircraft accumulate wear that must be repaired in the yard. Experienced service members accumulate fatigue that eventually shows in broken relationships and failed reenlistments.
I believe this is the actual lesson of the past two decades, and it is not a lesson about tired troops. During the U.S.-Iraq War, the Army pushed tours to 15 months and forced service members to stay on duty past the end of their enlistments. Those soldiers fought superbly – that was never in doubt. What was in doubt, and turned out badly, was the judgment that put them there.
The Navy learned its own version later. To keep ships in advanced positions where commanders wanted them, the Navy deferred maintenance on overseas-based ships. In 2015, the U.S. Government Accountability Office warned that the operational pace of deployments at sea was limiting training and maintenance and degrading the condition of overseas-based ships.
By June 2017, 37% of warfare readiness certifications for cruiser and destroyer crews in Japan had expired. That year, the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John S. McCain collided with commercial vessels in separate incidents, killing 17 sailors.
They died in a readiness system that had learned to treat the schedule as something nobody could refuse.
Borrowing military capacity
The U.S. appetite for military commitments has not tracked any comparable rise in danger.
International relations scholar Sidita Kushi and I built a database of every U.S. military intervention from 1776 through 2019. During the Cold War, while facing a nuclear-armed superpower, the United States began just over 2.3 new military interventions a year. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, that rate rose to 3.48, an increase of nearly 50%.
Meanwhile, the same data shows the waning strategic importance of the countries where the U.S. intervened. The U.S. got safer, yet it intervened more often in places that mattered less to Washington.
One number captures the whole pattern. In our data, 1974 was the last year in which the United States did not launch a military intervention.
A military force that has sustained more than 50 years of interventions is not a fragile one. But it has never been allowed to reset.
So the condition of the USS Abraham Lincoln is not evidence that our sailors are soft. Nor does it prove that the fleet is too small.
The crisis on the Lincoln is six months old and self-inflicted. Holding one ship past its return date does not create capacity; it borrows capacity from the next maintenance cycle or from another theater.
The USS George Washington, normally based in Japan, has now moved to the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln. That allows the Lincoln to come home, but it leaves the western Pacific without a U.S. aircraft carrier. The Navy closed one gap by opening another.
This reframes the overstretch argument now underway in Washington. I believe the force is not overstretched relative to the threats the U.S. faces – it is overstretched relative to the wars the U.S. president selects.
The crew of the Lincoln will do its job, and do it well, and not complain in public. That is precisely why I believe the burden of justification rests entirely on the civilian leaders who sent them, who were warned, and who chose war anyway.
Monica Duffy Toft, Professor of International Politics and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.