The Lincoln Trap: 265+ Days Deployed, an Indefinite Iran War, and a Carrier Gap in the Pacific

USS Abraham Lincoln was supposed to return home in May. More than 265 deployment days later, the Navy is pulling USS George Washington—the only forward-deployed U.S. carrier in the Pacific—west to relieve it. The rotation exposes the real limit of American carrier readiness: eleven hulls do not equal eleven available carriers, and an open-ended Iran mission is transferring the readiness gap from the Middle East to the Pacific.