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. 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. 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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
