Military families spoke out against President Donald Trump's remarks about their loved ones serving a record-long deployment as part of his war against Iran.
Lincoln's crew has endured roughly nine months at sea – a modern-day record – amid reported mental health strain and supply disruptions, and Military Times correspondent Natalie Oliveria told "CNN News Central" that the sailors' families were disappointed when the president stated their deployment was "not nearly long enough."
"One military spouse told me last night that it is infuriating to hear the commander in chief speak about our service members," Oliveria said. "This way the ships are not intended to seamlessly run that long without extreme maintenance every single day, and the sailors that keep that ship going need the same maintenance every day, too."
"Families are feeling a loss of confidence," she added. "They are looking for reassurance in a really vulnerable time, and leadership seems to be really short on compassion. That is the missing piece to this puzzle. You can have as many visits to the Lincoln as you want, you can say the wonderful job that the sailors are doing because they are. They are maintaining, but how much longer can they maintain? We are riding on the resilience of our sailors, assuming that it's open-ended, it's a bottomless supply of resilience. But how much longer can that be sustainable?"
The USS George Washington is leaving Japan for the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln, leaving the U.S. without an aircraft carrier in the western Pacific just as North Korea tests missiles and China watches for openings near Taiwan and Japan.
"To move another carrier strike group from the western Pacific near China, to reroute them to the Middle East is not a small thing," Oliveria said. "It's not a tap-and-go. There is a process to a change of command, especially under deployment."
"So this is a really big deal," she added. "We're currently not present in the western Pacific right now, which is also a really big deal, and I am not sure how the Navy will respond, but I know that families everywhere and the George Washington battle group and the USS Abraham Lincoln battle group are constantly cued in to the news, to each other, trying to make sense of what's going on, trying to stay afloat, of what they need to tell their kids, and trying to show up to work in the morning, trying to keep it going day after day, while hearing that there's mental health crises, that there's bad food, that there's no showers, that the toilets are broken."
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