USS Abraham Lincoln Leaves the Middle East After Almost 7 Months
Aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) has left the Middle East after almost seven months and is now in U.S. 7th Fleet, USNI News has learned.
As of Saturday, Lincoln, its escorts and the embarked Carrier Air Wing 9 were operating in the Indian Ocean in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, a Navy official confirmed to USNI News. The strike group has been deployed for 274 days.
The carrier left San Diego on Nov. 25 and made its last port call in December, according to the Navy. As of Saturday, Lincoln has been at sea for more than eight months since its last declared Dec. 11 port visit to Guam. Previous carrier strike groups deployed to the region have made unannounced port visits, but it’s unclear if Lincoln did during its time in the region. The stretch without a port call broke the 206-day record set by the crew of USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) during COVID-19 pandemic.
The record-breaking time at sea was brought to national attention after families complained publicly about difficult conditions board the ship and the increased stress of the crew. Due to the lack of access to Middle East logistics hubs due to the threat of Iranian strikes, Navy logistics vessels have to travel thousands of miles to bring food and fuel to the ships operating in the Arabian Sea. U.S. Central Command officials said the strike group had difficulty resupplying earlier in the year but had established better supply lines to the strike group.
Lincoln’s transit comes two days after Japan-based carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73) arrived in U.S. Central Command to maintain the Navy’s two-carrier presence in the Middle East as part of the ongoing U.S. conflict with Iran.
GW is joining East Coast-based USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77), which has been operating in the Middle East since late April.
It’s unclear if Lincoln will head straight to the West Coast or will make a port visit before returning home. Even without a port visit, it could take a month or more for the carrier to sail back to the U.S., based on previous Pacific transits stretching the deployment to 300 days or more. That length would push it to one of the longest carrier deployments since the close of the Vietnam War.
Lincoln’s time in the Middle East continues a trend of extended carrier deployments that began following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Southern Israel. Not counting Lincoln, U.S. carrier strike group deployments have averaged eight and a half months. In May, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) returned to port after a 326-day deployment — the longest carrier deployment since 1972, according to the USNI News carrier deployment database.
