The Plight of America’s Overextended Carrier Fleet

By Stephen Walsh

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

Ten aviators killed or missing, six imprisoned, four enlisted sailors lost in mishaps, and 20 aircraft destroyed: That was the price paid by the USS Midway during history’s longest aircraft carrier deployment, from April 1972 to March 1973. Imagine if the USS Abraham Lincoln, which left the Middle East this week after more than 270 days at sea, returned without two of its four fighter squadrons. It is an unfathomable thought.

 

But the Lincoln is paying a different price born from an overreliance on aircraft carriers for deterrence and intractable combat. Even at the Vietnam War’s climax, Midway entered port about 10 times during that deployment, allowing stressed crews to briefly escape the ship before resuming their daily brushes with death. No such luck for the Lincoln. The United States’ supply of aircraft carriers cannot satisfy the demand imposed upon them as the most visible symbols of U.S. commitment. Only systemic reforms or major capacity expansion can solve the 11-ship carrier fleet’s supply-and-demand problem.

 

A friend aboard the Lincoln estimated that sailors received seven hours of liberty in Guam last December, and another 18 in Oman in July, for approximately 25 hours of liberty over 285 days at sea. This is the newest manifestation of a trend that has been building for years and is a hell of the Defense Department’s own making.

 

The idea that sending Lincoln to port outside the Middle East sometime over the last few months would have meaningfully diminished U.S. strength likely overstates the dependence of combat operations on carriers. The U.S. has surged massive power to the Middle East. Through March and April, the U.S. Air Force, with help from the Lincoln and Gerald R. Ford strike groups, dismantled Iranian air defenses before settling into familiar “therapeutic bombing” wrapped in more aggressive language and deterrent posturing over the summer. In April a third carrier, USS George H.W. Bush, joined the campaign. That is a huge force for trading limited blows.

 

The Ford was sent home in May after its own 11-month cruise, prompting concerns that reduced firepower would weaken negotiations, despite the presence of the Air Force, a naval surface armada, and two other carriers. The Lincoln was prevented from leaving CENTCOM for rest and resupply for similar reasons. Aircraft carriers seem to be the only palatable symbols of U.S. military resolve.

 

This problem didn’t start and won’t end with the Lincoln. Carriers were extended for deterrence in the Middle East and Europe, and combat operations in Somalia, Yemen, and Venezuela in the decade leading to Operation Epic Fury. Lincoln’s logistical issues were extreme, but the reasons for the extension were common, despite the war. The U.S. Navy wielded 16 attack carriers and numerous supporting antisubmarine carriers in Vietnam. But today, as Rear Adm. Thomas Moore famously said in 2013, “We’re an 11-carrier Navy in a 15-carrier world.” Reducing demand through improved strategic discipline or more creative messaging seems unlikely, and the effects of constant extensions are well documented.

 

 

Understanding fleet overcommitment requires a command structure crash course. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act solidified two separate chains of command. Service chiefs, including the chief of naval operations, develop and equip their branches. They advise the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but can’t command operations. The geographic combatant commanders (CoComs) lead the uniformed operational chain of command, responsible for seven territorial regions. Carriers deployed to the Middle East are under the control of CENTCOM’s commander, tasked with theater objectives over force development. The Pentagon’s Global Force Management process reconciles CoCom requests and service training needs with the secretary of defense as arbiter.

 

The Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP) prescribes seven-month cruises in a 36-month cycle meant to avoid overtaxing ships. Combatant commaders must ask the defense secretary if they want to exceed this length by 30 days or more. Extensions and “double pumps”—deploying twice within an OFRP cycle—are used to maximize ship availability. Lincoln’s deployment is the second of a “double pump.” It has spent about 14 of the last 27 months deployed, well beyond OFRP’s policy of seven to eight months every 36.

 

The OFRP was implemented in 2014, seeking to restore fleet health as leaders prioritized competition with China in the mid-2010s. The plan worked initially, with just one of nine deployments between 2016 and 2018 extended. But the fleet was too small to sustain seven-month cruises.

 

The first Trump administration extended only three of 12 boats but relied on double pumps with minimal port visits to overcome COVID-19, maintenance problems, and the president’s fixation with Iran. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 2020-21 double pump established the punishing precedent that a carrier can operate without port calls. The Lincoln made headlines in 2019 when its deployment was extended to nearly 300 days to deter an "imminent threat” from Iran, despite skepticism that its presence actually affected that country’s behavior. The Nimitz was extended in January 2021 after being ordered home, when its exit provoked negative media coverage like Ford’s in 2026. Iran’s continuing intransigence after being pummeled by carriers makes one wonder if all this was worthwhile.

 

The Biden administration initially kept carriers out of the Middle East but extended the USS Harry S. Truman in the Mediterranean when Russia invaded Ukraine, despite the land-based theater’s ample Army and Air Force presence. Officials argued that carriers were reassuring to allies, but the mission’s abandonment after Hamas attacked Israel in 2023 suggests it wasn’t really necessary.

 

Carriers returned to CENTCOM for “the most intense naval combat since World War II” in the Red Sea. Crews shot down drones, flew large strikes into Yemen, and came under rocket and cruise missile attack. Six of seven participating carriers were extended.

 

Only two carriers deploying from the continental U.S. have returned on time without being double-pumped since 2019: the USS Carl Vinson in 2022 and the USS Nimitz in 2023, both of which operated in the Pacific without being redirected to the Middle East. The USS George H.W. Bush is the only ship of the second Trump administration to have avoided extension so far, but it has been at sea for just four months. Even if the Iran War ends tomorrow, extensions will likely continue.

 

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (PACOM) has gotten the worst of this deal. Each West Coast carrier like the Lincoln in CENTCOM is one fewer that can be used for Asian partner engagement and deterrence of China. The USS George Washington, the Japan-based carrier intended for crisis response in the Pacific, relieved the Lincoln in the Middle East. This was highly unusual and signaled PACOM’s descent down the priority list.

 

The Navy also bears the costs of carrier overuse as it pivots itself for war against China. A potential fight over Taiwan in 2027 has provided the service’s modus vivendi for years. Naval aviation and the carrier force are trapped between the war they want and the one they’re stuck with. The service absorbs the maintenance costs, retention problems, and material diminishment inflicted by campaigns it can’t control.

 

A larger fleet can expand supply, or systemic reform can reduce demand. Either way, resolution requires legislative intervention. Both Republican and Democratic administrations overuse carriers for strategic messaging, and attempted strategic pivots have been ineffective. As retired Adm. James Foggo wrote in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, “Navy attempts to deny [requests for forces] diplomatically and internally have failed.”

 

Fleet expansion is a popular cause and would increase supply. But there are three problems with the Navy’s shipbuilding plan. First, the Navy has an unfortunate track record of over-cost or failed acquisitions through the last several decades. It has, according to the Congressional Budget Office, consistently underestimated shipbuilding costs. Second, U.S. shipyards suffer from low manning and production, often struggling to complete major projects.

 

Third, the plan does not call for increasing the number of active carriers. As new Ford-class ships enter service, they will replace aging Nimitz-class boats. The total number of warships would increase but the carrier fleet would still be taxed unless other types of ships are used for strategic messaging—a prerogative of the executive branch. If senior leaders will only accept carriers as signals of U.S. strength, regardless of the other assets present, then the current shipbuilding plan won’t help.

 

Goldwater-Nichols Act reform could reduce demand by increasing services’ power and reducing that of the combatant commands. The act corrected serious problems with military disunity and was a major legislative victory, but detractors have argued it took too much influence away from the individual services, disrupted acquisitions processes, and produced strategic incoherence. Jim Thomas, former vice president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has been a leading voice on this front. He proposed in 2015 congressional testimony that a general staff could act as the military’s “global brain” to ensure forces are allocated more sensibly. He argued, “there is no central military entity today that has the authority to prioritize efforts across regions,” a capability critical to Gen. George Marshall’s successful World War II mantra: “Win in Europe, hold the Pacific.”

 

But there are serious civil-military relations concerns with a general staff, which was resisted in 1986 as an affront to civilian control of the military. The Hudson Institute’s Bryan McGrath argued in 2022 that tension between services and combatant commands is inherent in the constitutional order. Civilian control of the military, it follows, guarantees that short-term political objectives affect military deployments. “Assuming that the process can either account for or eliminate politics,” he admonished, “represents the conceit of the technocrat.”

 

Systemic reform that preserves the American character would be a generational undertaking. James Locher, an architect of the original legislation, has expressed openness to reform but warns that “the intellectual and political challenges of formulating this legislation will be staggering.” Likewise, fleet expansion requires massive taxpayer investment and congressional commitment. But carriers will continue as overextended symbols of fraying American power without congressional intervention.

 

The Lincoln’s journey has been terribly difficult but at least its crew left the Middle East safely. An F/A-18 Super Hornet was captured on video narrowly avoiding a surface-to-air missile last spring. Thankfully, that pilot did not pay the price that Midway’s lost aviators did. But if naval aviators must be on the line dodging missiles, they at least deserve a few port calls.