The Sentinel Woman

The Navy has been trapped in an entirely defensive and reactionary posture since 9/11, causing severe mental and physical exhaustion across the fleet.

To understand how heavy this burden is, you have to look at the post-Vietnam era. Following the Vietnam War, the military underwent a massive structural shift when the active draft officially ended in 1973, forcing the United States to transition to an all-volunteer force. Through the rest of the Cold War and the 1990s, this new volunteer Navy operated under a highly stable, predictable rhythm. Deployments were strictly capped at six months to the exact day. Ships routinely enjoyed frequent, relaxing port visits every few weeks to break up the monotony. The concept of spending 150 to 200+ consecutive days at sea without touching land simply did not exist for aircraft carriers back then.

We had one major warning of things to come, and that was the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in October 2000. It didn’t fully wake the entire military establishment up right away, but those of us at sea absolutely started to notice the shift. The atmosphere grew tenser, and the baseline security expectations began to tighten.

Then 9/11 happened, and that post-Vietnam baseline was shattered forever.

When the attacks hit toward the end of that October 2001 deployment cycle, the global chessboard flipped overnight. Ships coming out to relieve crews were sailed directly into a post-9/11 battlefield. A handful of ships in the battle group had to stay behind. Across the globe, every single USS ship was ordered to instantly flee their ports to avoid becoming static targets, and scheduled port visits were completely vaporized.

The Navy never went back to normal. Instead, it triggered a relentless operational tempo that has now surpassed Vietnam-era records for consecutive, uninterrupted days spent at sea:

• The Force Protection Tax: What started as a warning with the USS Cole became a permanent way of life after 9/11. It introduced mandatory, exhausting Force Protection Condition (FPCON) measures that never shut off. Whether a ship is at anchor, transiting a choke point, or sitting in a harbor, crews are trapped in a high-stress, 24/7 defensive watch rotation to guard against suicide boats, asymmetric threats, and modern drone swarms. Sailors never truly get to drop their guard.
• The Endless Reactionary Loop: Because the Navy is trying to police a highly volatile world with a fleet that has shrunk to under 300 ships—nearly half the size of the post-Vietnam fleet—leadership is stuck playing an unpredictable game of global whack-a-mole. Ships are routinely extended for months at a time because there are no fresh hulls to relieve them. We see this vividly in modern strike groups, which face months of continuous, high-intensity missile defense with zero downtime.
• The Strain on a Volunteer Force: Because the draft ended in 1973, this entire crushing operational tempo is being carried by a smaller, purely volunteer force. When recruitment misses its marks, individual sailors have to fill multiple roles. This combination of hyper-vigilance, back-to-back extensions, and the elimination of traditional liberty ports has triggered severe physical and mental exhaustion.
• Unprecedented Human Toll: While the USS Midway holds the historic total deployment length record of 332 days from the Vietnam era, modern crews are routinely asked to spend far more uninterruptedconsecutive days at sea without a single port visit. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower logged 206 consecutive days entirely at sea during the pandemic, and the USS Abraham Lincoln recently shattered modern milestones by spending over 260 days in its rotation.

The Navy is essentially burning the candle at both ends—trying to maintain a relentless wartime operational footprint with a downsized, peacetime fleet. By keeping our volunteer sailors in a permanent, reactionary defensive crouch, the machinery and the humans operating it are wearing out at the exact same time.