We need to know who botched the USS Lincoln deployment, and we need to know quick

You will be happy to know that Donald J. Trump, seditionist, has now weighed in on the multiple crises on the Nimitz-class supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln, where at least one sailor threw himself overboard and multiple others have attempted the same after food rationing, water shortages, and sanitary equipment breakdowns.

The ship's crew has not seen land in over six months, ship systems continue to deteriorate due to the absurdly overextended deployment, and even this Congress is beginning to question the logistical breakdowns that led to all of this.

Fear not, though. The commander in chief himself took a moment to address the situation as he traveled to his Bedminster golf resort for a nice relaxing weekend.

Reporter: Family members of service members are concerned about conditions on the USS Lincoln—

Trump: Well no, that ship is moving. No they're not. That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it's being replaced with another very similar ship.

Reporter: Have the deployments gone on too long? Are you worried

Trump: No, no, no. Not nearly long enough.

Ahem.

Now, in Trump's defense, the man is an irredeemable dipshit. He can't help it. He is unfit for office in a deep and profound way, and it seeps into everything he does: If you ask him any question, even obvious throwaway questions like "hey Donald are you going to eat a baby," his reptilian hate-brain immediately kicks in and now he's going to seriously think about eating a baby just because you kinda hinted that maybe he couldn't.

So when he says the deployments have gone on "not nearly long enough," that's not him saying that because he's thought about it or because it's his actual opinion. He's saying it because some loser schmuck had the audacity to talk to him, and Trump's reaction whenever anyone with less money than him tries to talk to him is to tell that person that whatever they just said was wrong. The man has the social instincts of an invasive Colombian cocaine hippo—and not much else.

So reporters need to watch how they phrase these questions, or next he's going to announce that Actually he's going to leave that ship out there for another six months too, just because your stupid shouted question means his next round of golf got delayed by 3.5 seconds he's never going to get back. This is what it means to have an unfit president.

The good news for the Lincoln's crew—at long last—is that this week's widespread reporting on the outrageous conditions on the ship finally did what the entire U.S. Navy was unable to accomplish. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his golfing boss have managed to find a carrier group that could replace the Lincoln's so that they can pretend to have solved the problem. It took them until yesterday to make it happen, possibly because carrier groups are hard to come by. Or possibly because nobody in the administration gave a flying shit until they started seeing stories about the Lincoln on their televisions.

The USS George Washington got the short straw, and is now allegedly heading out from its base in Japan to relieve the Lincoln, uhh, whenever it gets there.

This will not, however, fix the underlying problem. The Lincoln is not the only ship and crew suffering from this overextended deployment. That's how these things tend to work. The USS George HW Bush, also taking part in Trump's war, has reportedly been seeing similar food and water shortages, and the HW Bush will not be getting relieved.

It turns out that aircraft carriers are a limited resource even for the U.S. Navy—who knew?—and the United States simply does not have enough of them to maintain a semi-permanent floating airbase in the Arabian Sea no matter what civilian leadership thinks of it.

Because "semi-permanent" is not what aircraft carriers are for to begin with.

And that's the whole Hegsethian problem, right there.

There are a whole lot of questions that need to be asked here, and while I don't think any of us expect that the U.S. House and Senate will truly give a shit, once their Dear Leader has told them not to, somebody needs to answer them.

How, exactly, did the U.S. military fail to account for the logistical implications of a six-month wartime deployment of the Lincoln, its myriad support ships, and the many other ships now parked at sea? The modern U.S. military was long thought to be the uncontested logistics leader, unmatched in its ability to not just ship an army halfway around the world but to keep them supplied with fuel, food, and all the other basic necessities that determine whether an army remains an army after a week of fighting.

Did the Navy lose that capability? Did military leaders foresee these problems from the beginning, it being obvious from the instruction manuals that modern carrier groups come with when you pick them up at the store, and were their warnings ignored by possibly drunk, definitely unqualified civilian leaders who couldn't be bothered to listen?

Or was the military in fact well prepared for the short duration fight White House insisted on, but when things began to drag out and supplies began to run low did (again, possibly drunk) civilian leaders refuse to even acknowledge the changed conditions? Did the whole "strategy" of the war become "shut up, boat nerds, I'm in charge of the boats and the boats don't move until I tell them to move?"

The answer here is important. If we've found another limit to U.S. military power that the U.S. military was itself unaware of—a new inability to supply ships because after Donald Rumsfeld started privatizing logistics the nation's armed forces forgot how to do those themselves—that's one thing.

If drunken civilian leadership was warned that you cannot expect aircraft carriers and crews to spend six nonstop wartime months at sea without dock-based resupply, and those civilian leaders told the generals and admirals to shut up and do what they're told, then that's an entirely different problem. That would mean that the military isn't less capable than it was two years ago, our troops are instead being endangered and sabotaged by dipshit administration figures who don't know their Fox News ass from their Fox News elbow.

Here's another specific question I'd like to see asked: To what extent has Pete Hegseth's unprecedented purge of non-white, non-male officers contributed to these problems?

Hegseth has replaced a number of senior officers across the military since taking over as Secretary this year, including by firing former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ Brown; Adm. Lisa Franchetti, former Chief of Naval Operations; Gen. James Slife, former vice chief of staff of the Air Force; and Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

Hegseth fired Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti just weeks into his tenure. He instead tapped Adm. Daryl Caudle, who wasn't one of senior Navy officials' own choices but instead appears to have gotten the job through allegedly unethical sucking up and sharing one of Trump and Hegseth's favorite lawyers.

Caudle seems to be the perfect person to testify about these scandals, don't you think? Haul him in and see what he has to say about the current state of Naval Operations, at the very least?

There is something very dodgy here. If we're spending $13 billion a piece to build aircraft carriers, there is the general expectation that they will not be rendered unserviceable after senior leadership forgets that the crew of 5,000 needs to eat food all the time and not just as a special treat. A war "strategy" that relies on parking entire carrier groups offshore and just leaving them there for half a year without dockside maintenance or resupply seems like, to use a military term, a tremendous fuckup on somebody's part, and possibly on the part of 50 to 100 different people if we're really going to start looking into it.

This isn't a question of feeling sorry for the crews. It's a rather profound national security problem. Not that Pete Hegseth seems to understand that, as he frantically hand-waves and bug-eyes his way through questions about the problem.

Watch the video at that last link, by the way. Yikes. I'm beginning to think that alcohol may be the least of that guy's problems, and I know I'm far from the first person to think it.