By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
The USS Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for 250 days without a single port call — a stretch NBC News reported to be the longest on record for a U.S. carrier — and the families of the sailors aboard say the toll is showing.
In interviews with NBC News, relatives described low morale and supply shortages. One mother told correspondent Tom Llamas that her son feels a sense of "powerlessness" aboard the ship — a quote NBC News attributed directly to her in that interview. CBS News reported separately that families have described food shortages, broken plumbing and mounting mental health strain among the crew, citing multiple relatives of sailors and Marines on board.
Those concerns sharpened earlier this month when a sailor went overboard and was rescued, an incident CBS News says is now under investigation. Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, discussed the reports on CBS News' "The Daily Report," though the network did not detail his specific conclusions.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pushed back hard, telling CBS News the conditions aboard the Lincoln have been "completely misrepresented," a quote reported verbatim by CBS News. He did not, in the reporting available, offer a point-by-point rebuttal of the specific claims — the shortages, the plumbing, the overboard incident — leaving families and senators with dueling accounts rather than a resolved record.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has demanded answers, saying the ship has not come ashore in more than 200 days — a figure attributed to the senator's own public statement, though it runs short of the 250-day count NBC News reported elsewhere in this story. The Press has not independently reconciled the two figures; both are reported here as stated by their respective sources.
A U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss deployment plans publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, told NBC News the Lincoln is now set to head home from the Middle East, where it has operated amid heightened tension with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. That timeline rests on the account of a single unnamed official; the Press could not independently confirm it.
What isn't yet public: an independent accounting of conditions aboard, or the findings of the Navy's investigation into the overboard incident. Until those surface, the record consists of family testimony on one side and a defense secretary's denial on the other.
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by NBC News and CBS News.
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