USS Lincoln headed home after extended deployment and concerns over conditions on board
The USS Abraham Lincoln is on its way home after a historic deployment that included nearly 275 consecutive days at sea and reports of mental health challenges and shortages aboard while it was supporting the Iran war.
A U.S. official told NBC News the Lincoln has been sailing home for a few days and will be back in San Diego in a few weeks. The Lincoln was relieved by the Asia-based USS George Washington aircraft carrier, which arrived in the region Wednesday and was now operating in the Middle East, according to U.S. Central Command.
In an op-ed published Sunday in The Wall Street Journal, Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, said he visited the Lincoln a day earlier and announced to the crew they were returning home.
“I delivered the words every deployed sailor and Marine longs to hear: ‘You have delivered a performance for the ages, and now you are going home,’” Cooper wrote.
It was not clear when the Lincoln would arrive back in the U.S. or whether it would make a port stop along the way, but the journey takes just over a month.
The Washington arrived as concerns have grown about the Lincoln’s extended nine-month deployment about reports of crew stress and poor mental health, as well as supply shortages, including food and hygiene products.
Several Democratic lawmakers have pressed the Department of Defense for accountability over conditions aboard the Lincoln, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said were “completely misrepresented.”
Extended deployments of carriers wear on service members who are away from home for long periods and increase strain on the ship and its equipment. While renewed hostilities between the U.S. and Iran calmed in recent weeks, the Navy is enforcing a reimposed blockade on Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, and the Trump administration has offered no clarity on how it intends to wind down the war.
Hegseth has said the U.S. can maintain the blockade “indefinitely.”
President Donald Trump this week downplayed reports about conditions on the Lincoln, which left its homeport in San Diego in November and arrived in the Middle East in January. Trump called the nearly nine months at sea that the sailors endured a “good period of time” but added that “over the years, we’ve had them out there much longer.”
Trump told reporters Monday that he spoke with a retired admiral over the weekend who recounted being on ships for “much longer.” Trump said the admiral assured him that the Lincoln is “beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of.” Trump did not name the admiral.
In a statement Sunday after visiting the Lincoln, Cooper praised the carrier’s leaders for prioritizing mental health and resilience.
“History will record this deployment as one of the most operationally intense and consequential of the modern era,” Cooper said.
The Washington joins the USS George H.W. Bush in the Middle East, leaving Asia without an American carrier strike group at a time when China has shown more signs of aggression.
The lack of a U.S. carrier in the Pacific may be short-lived if the Navy deploys another in the next couple of months. But it shows how the open-ended operations with Iran are running some American sailors ragged, analysts say, while the Trump administration further retreats from the Asia-Pacific region and focuses on the Western Hemisphere.
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