Thousands of sailors remain deployed as the war expands, but Congress has yet to clearly authorize the mission, define its limits or decide how it ends.
whats the real problem, long, miserable deployments are not new, and a Navy career built on complaint about cold showers and bad coffee has never been the point. What sailors sign up for is not suffering in the abstract — it's suffering in service of a mission whose purpose has been reasoned through and accounted for by the civilians who ordered it. That has always been the trade: the crew bears the cost, the chain of command bears the responsibility for making sure the cost is spent on something real. Every generation of sailors that endured the deployment that wouldn't end did so trusting that someone above them had a sound reason for extending it.That trust is the thing actually in question here — not whether a carrier deployment is hard. Two attempted suicides and a crew this depleted after two hundred-plus days without a port call isn't proof that the Navy has gotten soft. It's a symptom worth reading honestly: when a crew stops believing the hardship serves a coherent purpose, and stops trusting the man setting that purpose, endurance turns into erosion. The complaint isn't "the ocean is uncomfortable." It's that nobody currently has confidence the discomfort is buying anything.The Secretary of Defense's job includes making that trust possible — setting a mission worth the sacrifice and being a leader the force can actually believe in. When that confidence is absent, the failure isn't in the sailors for noticing. It's in the office that was supposed to earn it.
News outlets, Stars and Stripes and the Navy Times reported this week that there had been multiple attempts by crew members to jump overboard, citing interviews with sailors and families of those on board who described the impacts of the lengthy deployment. Representative Blumenthal in a letter to the Defense Secretary: “There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns,” aboard the ship, as well as “disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”
Congress has, in a quirky, inept, and indirect way done its job. Looked at from the other direction, is like the reverse concept of the pocket veto. It says no without saying no. Or, in this case, it says yes without saying yes.
Congress knew what has been going on. It could have voted against confirming many appointments, and it could have objected to wars it didn't directly declare. It chose to do neither.
As you have perfectly said, "Congress has found a way to participate without owning the decision." You could argue that Article 1 should be interpreted as requiring Congress to own the decision. And if you make that argument to your readers, you're preaching to the choir. But no one in power, and with authority, has made that argument. It's possible that Sanders, or Warren, or someone else could have made that argument to the SCOTUS. They didn't. The opposite of preaching to the choir is spitting into the wind.
They should put into a safe port and allow the crew to have shore leave for at least several days.
whats the real problem, long, miserable deployments are not new, and a Navy career built on complaint about cold showers and bad coffee has never been the point. What sailors sign up for is not suffering in the abstract — it's suffering in service of a mission whose purpose has been reasoned through and accounted for by the civilians who ordered it. That has always been the trade: the crew bears the cost, the chain of command bears the responsibility for making sure the cost is spent on something real. Every generation of sailors that endured the deployment that wouldn't end did so trusting that someone above them had a sound reason for extending it.That trust is the thing actually in question here — not whether a carrier deployment is hard. Two attempted suicides and a crew this depleted after two hundred-plus days without a port call isn't proof that the Navy has gotten soft. It's a symptom worth reading honestly: when a crew stops believing the hardship serves a coherent purpose, and stops trusting the man setting that purpose, endurance turns into erosion. The complaint isn't "the ocean is uncomfortable." It's that nobody currently has confidence the discomfort is buying anything.The Secretary of Defense's job includes making that trust possible — setting a mission worth the sacrifice and being a leader the force can actually believe in. When that confidence is absent, the failure isn't in the sailors for noticing. It's in the office that was supposed to earn it.
they should dail back and fight trump and hegseth, they can you a couple of guys from the mess hall
News outlets, Stars and Stripes and the Navy Times reported this week that there had been multiple attempts by crew members to jump overboard, citing interviews with sailors and families of those on board who described the impacts of the lengthy deployment. Representative Blumenthal in a letter to the Defense Secretary: “There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns,” aboard the ship, as well as “disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”
Congress has, in a quirky, inept, and indirect way done its job. Looked at from the other direction, is like the reverse concept of the pocket veto. It says no without saying no. Or, in this case, it says yes without saying yes.
Congress knew what has been going on. It could have voted against confirming many appointments, and it could have objected to wars it didn't directly declare. It chose to do neither.
As you have perfectly said, "Congress has found a way to participate without owning the decision." You could argue that Article 1 should be interpreted as requiring Congress to own the decision. And if you make that argument to your readers, you're preaching to the choir. But no one in power, and with authority, has made that argument. It's possible that Sanders, or Warren, or someone else could have made that argument to the SCOTUS. They didn't. The opposite of preaching to the choir is spitting into the wind.