Top Navy officer says troops should expect ‘longer deployments’

The Navy’s top officer said sailors and their families should prepare for longer deployments until the service has a larger force and fleet.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle fielded questions from sailors during a livestreamed Q&A session at Fort Meade, Maryland, on Monday, which covered deployments to quality-of-life issues for shoreside personnel and Pentagon-directed policies like stricter grooming standards.

“In the short term, until I can grow the Navy we need,” Daryl said, “I hate to admit it, but longer deployments are going to be probably part of that.”

Caudle also said one of the “biggest hardships” that the service is looking to address is the “uncertainty” that extended deployments have on sailors and families.

“When sailors know how long they’re going to be away from family, they go plan their lives to that, and they can get all those events that would necessarily be in their life — from attending weddings to childbirth to family events to vacations — they know how to go build that into the schedule,” Caudle said. 

“But when I just basically extend in these small chunks a little bit time after time, that brings a lot of uncertainty to families,” Caudle added. “I’m working with that along with the other Joint Chiefs to try to get that more defined. I think that’ll improve going forward.” 

Navy officials did not provide additional context for Caudle’s remarks, which come after recent news reports on quality-of-life issues and mental health concerns among sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. The ship left San Diego, California in November and had its deployment extended to support U.S. operations against Iran. The ship is scheduled to stop in Thailand on Wednesday and stay for a few days until the ship heads home to San Diego.

Currently, the Lincoln has been deployed for nine months. Though the Navy has not officially confirmed the date it is expected to reach its home port, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported its return date as late September or early October. If that timeline holds true, then the carrier and its crew would have been away for nearly 10 months. 

“It’s my earnest attempt to really try to keep those [deployments] at seven months,” Caudle said, adding that the goal is to have a Navy “that can sustain a seven-month deployment and still give our combatant commanders the amount of naval force they need to accomplish their missions, solve their key operational problems, and make sure they have all the naval force necessary to do what they need to do.”

Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy John Perryman told reporters last week that families of sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is heading to U.S. Central Command in the coming weeks, are being told to plan for at least eight months away.

‘We just don’t have enough aircraft carriers’

In order to meet that seven-month goal, Caudle referred to efforts to improve shipbuilding, which has been a longstanding national security issue for the sea-based service, which can’t build enough ships fast enough to replace aging and retiring vessels. As the fleet has shrunk, analysts have found that the Navy has been doing “more with less.” The Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan called for increasing the current fleet of 295 ships to 390 in the next two-and-a-half decades.

Steven Wills, a former Navy officer and expert for the Center for Maritime Strategy, said the seven-month goal comes from the 2014 Optimized Fleet Response Plan, which includes deploying more aircraft carriers. But the trade-off, Wills explained, is that extended deployments delay a ship’s repair and sustainment.

“The carrier repair plan is going to be upset for a decade or more now based on the extensions of both Ford and Abraham Lincoln,” Wills said. “Really, it’s a question of numbers. We just don’t have enough aircraft carriers to do this.”

A USNI News analysis of Navy deployments found that the service’s carriers have averaged 8.5-month deployments since the U.S. response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel and Houthi attacks on commercial ships in the region.

The Lincoln broke records when it sailed uninterrupted for more than 250 days. At the town hall, Caudle acknowledged that the lack of port calls impacted the crews’ quality of life and drew comparisons to the USS Gerald R. Ford, which broke records of its own, this time for the longest deployment since the Vietnam War, and faced its own issues due to its extended tour. The USS Ford deployed for 11 months and sailed for 326 days across three different Navy fleet regions, but made stops in Croatia and Crete.

Wills said the stress falls on Navy aircraft carriers because they’re used as a “powerful geopolitical chess piece” and a way of “projecting U.S. power.”

“It’s visible. It has actual striking power. You can refuel it and rearm it relatively quickly,” he said. “A surface warship or a submarine has to go into port and have its missile tubes reloaded. You can reload an aircraft carrier at sea while it’s still dropping bombs and doing things.”