The USS Abraham Lincoln is currently somewhere in the Pacific, doing the Lord’s work of reminding everyone that America has eleven of these things and you have zero.
It’s a nuclear-powered city with 5,000 residents, a nuclear reactor, and a Starbucks-sized population of people who haven’t seen land in months.
It also costs roughly $13 billion, which is the kind of money that makes you wonder if the Navy is just buying the extended warranty on everything out of spite.
For that price, you’d think the toilets would work.
This is the same class of ship that made headlines for plumbing issues so bad the crew was basically playing sewage Jenga.
When you cram thousands of sailors into a steel tube for months, things get weird fast.
The carrier’s history reads like a Reddit thread that went off the rails.
It was deployed for an absurd stretch in 2019-2020, a marathon of a cruise that had sailors joking about becoming barnacles.
Then came the COVID outbreak, because of course it did.
That deployment got so long that families back home started treating “when is the ship coming back” like a conspiracy theory.
The answer was always “soon,” which in Navy speak means “eventually, maybe, don’t hold your breath.” And yet, the Lincoln keeps showing up.
It’s the friend who says they’re five minutes away while still in the shower.
Except this friend carries 70-plus aircraft and can ruin your entire coastline’s afternoon.
The ship’s air wing does the heavy lifting.
F/A-18s, helicopters, the whole flying circus.
Every launch is a controlled explosion that costs more than your student loans, and they do it hundreds of times a week because that’s just Tuesday.
Sailors on the Lincoln work 12-hour shifts, sleep in racks stacked like prison bunks, and eat food that’s been described generously as “edible.” They do this for months, in the middle of nowhere, so that shipping lanes stay open and your Prime packages arrive.
You don’t have to support every deployment to respect the people stuck on them.
The politics are above everyone’s pay grade.
There’s something deeply American about a floating city that costs more than most countries’ GDP and still runs on duct tape, caffeine, and the unshakeable confidence of a 19-year-old from Ohio who just wants to go home.
So next time you see a headline about the Lincoln, remember what it actually is.
It’s not a symbol or a strategy or a talking point.
It’s a very expensive, very crowded, very tired floating neighborhood with a really good parking situation for jets. **The Take:** The USS Abraham Lincoln is a monument to American ambition and American logistics, which are two different things that somehow share a hull.
Final Thoughts
It’s impressive, it’s absurd, and it’s held together by people who deserve better than a clogged toilet and a 300-day deployment.