Trump Iran: The USS Lincoln shows that something is very wrong inside the U.S. Navy.

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The dreadful conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, a Navy aircraft carrier stationed near Iran for nine months, have been widely reported. They include food shortages, water contamination, plumbing stoppages, lost mail, and mental health decay, spurring some crew members to jump ship.

President Donald Trump denied the news stories as “fake,” but the top U.S. commander in the region, Adm. Brad Cooper, confirmed them after inspecting the vessel.

The question many are asking with gaped jaws: How could this have possibly happened? The Defense Department’s budget tops $1 trillion, the largest sum ever, even allowing for inflation. The war on Iran is Trump’s top priority. How could basic operations on the Navy’s most highly valued and most vigorously maintained platform have deteriorated so badly?

Trump is partly to blame for starting the war under the belief that he could win it in a few weeks, with no need for a Plan B. But the lack of a Plan B also stems from miscalculations and mistakes in the Navy’s plans and budgets dating back more than 30 years—since the end of the Cold War.

The Navy has a large number of supply officers. For operations in the Middle East, some are based at U.S. Central Command headquarters, some in the Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain, some on each ship. Supplies for the vessels—food, fuel, assorted goods for the shops on board—come from local suppliers in the region or from ports, especially in Bahrain, where ships with the Navy’s Combat Logistics Command bring in supplies.

These supply officers must have known they were in deep trouble from the first days of the war, when Iranian missiles destroyed much of the U.S. base in Bahrain, including the hub of the entire region’s supply chain. Additional targets were hit in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates—also part of the supply chain that the Navy had depended on for decades.

“This meant we could no longer send supply ships there,” a former senior Navy officer told me. The closest alternative hub was the British-controlled island of Diego Garcia, 2,200 miles away. Initially, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer barred U.S. planes and warships from using the island as a base for attacking Iran. After pressure from Trump, Starmer gave them access for “defensive” purposes—which meant, mainly, for use as a supply hub.

The island is beyond the range of most Iranian missiles. (Even so, Iran launched two attacks; one missile fell into the ocean, and the other was shot down.) However, by the same token, it’s a far way from the U.S. ships and so takes much longer to replenish supplies.

Another factor, according to a former Navy operations officer, is that some of the usual local vendors, especially of fresh food, cut back their supplies, fearing that they too would be attacked by Iran.

Even without these restraints, the supply system would have been stretched because, since mobilization for a possible war began late last year, the Navy has stationed two aircraft carriers and their escort destroyer ships in the area—whereas it has almost never had more than one and often none at all. Each carrier has about 5,000 crew members; the escort ships carry a combined total of another 1,000. So now, with two carrier groups, there are 12,000 people to service and feed, not 6,000.

Another source of strain: In peacetime, the ports were used for rest and recuperation by sailors seeking a break from an aircraft carrier’s crammed quarters and exhausting routines. The need for R&R is especially dire during wartime, when their stations take on life-and-death intensity. (During the Vietnam War, American soldiers were given weeklong leaves in Hawai‘i, Australia, or the Philippines.) Yet, because the ports were under Iranian attack, the crews on board the USS Abraham Lincoln were denied reprieve—aggravating their shortages and mental strain.

As the former Navy operations officer put it, “There was a breakdown in gross supply chains—with gross results.”

The Lincoln’s fate has been the most heavily publicized, but it isn’t the only aircraft carrier to suffer these traumas. The former senior Navy officer, who stays in touch with current commanders, told me, “Many if not all carrier deployments in recent years have been extended to eight or nine months” from their usual schedule of six, especially but not exclusively in the Middle East. “In that regard, we are eating our future readiness. It’s not sustainable.” He added that the escort destroyer ships policing the blockade of Iran “are just as bad off, if not worse.”

Could this have been prevented? Perhaps, if the Navy had moved away from large aircraft carriers and more toward small ships that could attack with speed and stealth along shorelines. (The Navy did have a program to do this, called the Littoral Combat Ships, but the boats were disastrously built, and the whole plan was abandoned.) Or more redundancy could have been built into the supply chains, but this would have cost money for contingencies that few took seriously enough to fund.

A big part of the problem is a failure of imagination. The people in power—officers and civilians—seem to have ignored the possibility that the enemy would attack our weakest links, in this case the supply hubs. The former operations officer, who keeps up with publications of naval strategy, told me that several junior officers have been pointing out this issue for some time now—but few senior officers, besides the specialists, have paid attention.

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An old adage has it that strategy is for amateurs and logistics is for professionals. This isn’t quite true. (The Trump administration is clear proof that strategy requires professionals too.) But it is accurate to say that strategy is adventurous, while logistics can be boring. As a result, few pay attention to the latter’s needs. Strategy also focuses on weapons systems, which corporations build for lots of money and legislators approve for lots of factory jobs. By contrast, logistics is pretty mundane; the big contractors don’t pine for contracts to build oiler ships, cranes, or commissaries.

This pattern is nothing new. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, many analysts and journalists noted that the Pentagon was spending large amounts of money on weapons but not much on spare parts, ammunition, or fuel (the budget account known as “operations and maintenance”). It didn’t matter much back then, as the U.S. wasn’t fighting a lot of wars. Now that we are, you’d think more attention would be paid. But it hasn’t been, as we’ve seen in reports about the depletion of munitions and, now, the deterioration of an entire aircraft carrier’s infrastructure, owing to what would have once been called a “small war” against a third-rate military power after just a few months of battle.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that if we ever have to fight a truly long war against a more capable military, like, say, China, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble—unless we fix these problems.