TRANSCRIPT:
So little over a week ago, I spoke out about the conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and by now you’ve heard all about it. Sailors at sea for more than 250 days, a crew pushed past the breaking point. And when I posted about it, my inbox got flooded, message after message from service members and their families, all telling a version of the same story, and not just from that ship, from all over the place, from the Guard and Reserve, active duty troops, spouses, and parents back home.
And the more I read, the clearer it became that the Lincoln is not an isolated failure. The whole system is straining. And the people inside it are the ones that are paying. So today I want to walk through what’s actually happening. What these men and women are telling me in their own words, why it’s so dangerous, and what has to change. This one matters to me, so stick with me here, because I think it’s important.
So let me start with how this is supposed to work because that’s the key to understanding what’s gone wrong. The Guard and Reserve were built to be a strategic resource, the force that you call up when the nation truly needs it. A typical mobilization is a deployment of two to three months, roughly every couple of years. This is mainly with like air crew, pilots, stuff like that. These are part-time service members. They have careers back home, they have small businesses, they have families who plan their lives around a fairly predictable rhythm.
That predictability is what makes the system work. That is not what’s happening in the war with Iran. Guard and Reserve members are being mobilized more often on short notice and for far longer stretches than the system was ever designed to handle. Even at the height of the global war on terrorism, we didn’t see anything like this. In a lot of cases, they’re carrying a heavier load than their active duty counterparts.
People were told that it was going to be a few months. Now they’re crossing six past multiple extensions with no end in sight. I got a message just the other day from a KC-135 pilot in the Guard about to deploy for the third time in 18 months. Just got home at the end of June, and he wrote, and I’m quoting him, “I am burnt out as well as my family.”
Then he asked whether there was anything he could do to help himself and his other guardsmen without harming his career.
Think about that.
A pilot so worn down that he’s writing a stranger for help, but so worried about the consequences that he has to ask whether speaking up will end his career. That fear runs through nearly every one of these messages. I did an anonymous interview with one of the service members who reached out and I wanted to read some of it to you because it’s more powerful than anything I could say for them. When I asked what makes this deployment different from a normal one, he said, and this is to quote:
“What makes the current circumstances different is being told initially that you’d be gone for a few months, and now crossing six months and multiple extensions later with no end in sight. It takes a toll that eventually nobody is immune from.”
And on what it’s doing to families and livelihoods, he says, “no one’s life is built to be sent across the world without an end date. For it to keep dragging on with no tenable end date eventually causes significant stress and even harm to military members, their families, and their civilian livelihoods because no one can plan anything.”
And finally, this line, which I keep coming back to.
“We can’t promise anyone at home anything. And that is starting to wear on even the most resilient people.”
I understand that in a way it’s hard to put it into words. I spent 20 years in the Air Force and the Air National Guard. I deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, other places as well. Even after I was elected to Congress, I stayed in the Guard because I loved serving and knew how much the mission mattered. And here’s what I learned: a deployment is hard, but it’s manageable if you know when it ends. What breaks people is uncertainty. One of my own rotations got delayed just a few days over aircraft maintenance, and I still remember the anger and actual despair of it. Just a few days.
What these men and women are living through is that same gut punch over and over, stretched across months with no date on the calendar for it to end.
It’s not just unfair. It’s genuinely dangerous on three levels. So first, for the individual we saw where this road leads on the Lincoln, when a sailor went overboard and what the Navy is treating as a mental health episode. And other families say that he wasn’t the only one who reached that point. When you run people past their limits with no relief and no end date, that can happen. And I want to make something abundantly clear. These are some of the toughest people we have, and even they have a breaking point. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make the military stronger, it just gets someone hurt.
Second, for our communities back home, when a guardsman deploys for six months instead of two or three that they were promised, a small business loses its owner, a town loses its paramedic, its teacher, its police officer. Employers are trying to do their part, but they’re missing key people for twice as long as anyone planned. Families that braced for a short absence are improvising around an empty chair with no idea when it gets filled. These communities were never prepared to have these people gone this long because that wasn’t part of the deal.
And third, for the military itself, the person I interviewed said it plainly. “Being run down like this is going to devastate Guard and Reserve retention” and they’re right. You can slap a stop loss order on people to keep them from leaving in the short term, but you can’t force loyalty, and you cannot rebuild trust once you’ve squandered it. People have to make decisions on whether they’ll rejoin or not when their enlistment runs up. We are right now teaching a generation of patriots that their service will be spent carelessly. They’ll remember that. And the force will be weaker for years because of it.
“We can’t promise anyone at home anything. And that is starting to wear on even the most resilient people.”
Now here’s where I have to be direct because the fixes don’t work if we misdiagnose the disease. The immediate answer is a rotation plan. The service member I spoke with said “the fog of war that existed at the start has faded, and a rotation plan is totally feasible.” Predictable timelines, hard limits on open-ended extensions, that would ease almost every burden that we’ve talked about here, and it should happen immediately. But I’d be lying if I said a rotation plan alone fixes this, because the reason these people are stuck out there with no end date is that there’s no plan for how this war ends. And there’s no plan for how it ends because the people running it will not admit that their strategy failed.
This war was sold to the country as quick, maybe a few weeks. In fact, they took no effort to actually sell it to the American people. But now we’re months in, tens of billions of dollars spent, and our most valuable munitions burn through faster than we can replace them.
Our own intelligence community is reporting that Iran has restored the vast majority of its military capability. There’s no way around it. The strategy isn’t working. And rather than face that, this administration keeps people deployed indefinitely because pulling them back would mean admitting the truth.
Put plainly, the sailors on the Lincoln and the guardsmen writing me these messages are stuck out there because Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth can’t bring themselves to say that the war isn’t going the way they promised. And when Hegseth was confronted with the crisis on the Lincoln, his response was to attack the reporting and suggest the service members speaking up were out of line. And when Donald Trump was asked about the length of the deployment, he said, quote, “not nearly long enough.”
Hmm. Alright.
Let me be very clear. Every member of our military has the right to raise concerns. That is not inappropriate and it’s not unpatriotic. No matter what the Secretary of Defense would like you to believe, it is their right, and it’s actually codified.
So here’s what I believe needs to happen. First, rotate our people with predictable timelines and firm limits on extensions. This needs to happen yesterday. Next, tell the truth about the strategy because you can’t build a responsible deployment plan on top of a war with no defined objective and no defined end. Admitting a strategy has failed is not weakness. Refusing to admit it while Americans pay the price is the actual failure of leadership. And finally, protect the people who speak up because they’re doing their country a service, often at real risk to themselves.
I want to close with a point that’s vital to understanding this whole issue. The people I heard from over the last two weeks are not complainers. They’re some of the most dedicated Americans we have. They signed up knowing the job would be hard. What they did not sign up for was to be forgotten, to be extended and extended while people who sent them refuse to level with the country about why.
They can’t speak freely. Most are still in uniform, still worried, like the people in my inbox, about what honesty might cost them. So the rest of us have to speak for them and refuse to let anyone tell you that asking these questions is disrespectful to the troops. Asking them is the most respectful thing we can do. Because it’s the people who love this country and the people who serve it who have the most to gain from getting this right.
