Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, between sets of pushups, has had his focus on getting the woke out of the U.S. military, getting the press out of the Pentagon, getting people who didn’t rise through the chain of command because they hosted weekend Fox News talk shows to respect his authoritah.
Maybe he should have been devoting a few minutes here and there to making sure the USS Abraham Lincoln – which set sail from San Diego for the North Arabian Sea on Nov. 21, was supposed to return in May, but is still on deployment, supporting military operations against Iran – was doing better for its 5,000 sailors than having them eat rotten food and having to deal with overflowing toilets and shortages of drinking water.
“Even people that have been deployed a hundred times claim this one to be the worst and believe it can get worse than this. The Navy does not care,” one sailor wrote in a text to family that has been made public, as hundreds of family members have pressed the Pentagon for answers – and reports have emerged that some of the sailors are so desperate that they’ve tried to jump overboard.
This is where we get to the part of the story that involves a guy named Hung Cao, who you may remember as having been on the business end of a political whuppin’ by Tim Kaine in a 2024 U.S. Senate race in Virginia, is the Acting Secretary of the Navy.
It’s hard to figure out how Cao, who could barely be bothered to campaign on his own behalf in his 2024 Senate race – seems he wanted the title, but wasn’t interested in doing the work – would be a part of the Defense Department dropping the ball on something, but here we are.
The guy who mailed it in during his Senate campaign did at least show up for a meeting last week with more than 200 family members of Navy personnel deployed on the USS Abraham Lincoln, in which the family members read him the riot act with their concerns about their sailors’ mental health and safety.
MS NOW reported that Cao said at the meeting that another aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, was being prepared to relieve the Abraham Lincoln, though he didn’t provide a timeline.
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., is pressing Cao and Hegseth for details, and is demanding answers on how the lack of “hygiene products, mold, broken toilets or laundry facilities, inadequate water supplies, or other deteriorating living conditions” is being addressed.
“There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns, and disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months,” Blumenthal wrote in a letter to Cao and Hegseth that was released publicly on Wednesday.
“These reports warrant immediate attention, but they also raise a broader question: whether the Navy can sustain the operational tempo now being demanded of its carrier force, particularly as this administration repeatedly commits U.S. forces to conflicts of its own choosing and increasingly relies on aircraft carriers to sustain those operations,” Blumenthal wrote.
Hegseth, breathless from a set of burpees, responded in an interview with Newsmax on Thursday, in which he asserted the claims about all the awful stuff going on with the Abraham Lincoln are being “completely misrepresented.”
“Listen, we make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain, has everything we can provide them at every single moment,” Hegseth told the MAGA TV news network.
“So, as someone who’s not been on a ship like that but been on long deployments, I feel it. I want them home as soon as everybody else, too. I want folks rotated as quickly as possible. I want the best for them. My commanders know that, our service secretaries know that. The president expects that,” Hegseth said.
The president is more concerned with his ballroom, and arresting innocent people because his pool guy botched the job at the Lincoln Memorial.
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Chris Graham
