The Weakest Link

What an aircraft carrier taught me about the difference between power and resilience

First essay in the National Resilience series

For more than 250 days, the USS Abraham Lincoln did not see a home port — a modern Navy record. Sailors rationed food. Water ran short. Mail piled up on the other side of the world with no way to reach the ship. None of it happened because the Lincoln lost a fight or took a hit. It just couldn't get home.

The reason traces back to a place most Americans have never heard of: a U.S. Navy logistics hub in Bahrain, headquarters of the Fifth Fleet, and the traditional supply point for this kind of operation. Iranian attacks damaged it badly enough that the Pentagon had to reroute resupply for the Lincoln to Diego Garcia, roughly 2,200 miles farther from where the carrier needed to be. An aircraft carrier doesn't usually need to enter port for fuel and ammunition; replenishment ships handle that at sea. But those replenishment ships need somewhere nearby to load and turn around. Push that somewhere far enough away, and the whole system stretches past its design limits.

What strikes me is that the carrier itself — the most expensive, most heavily defended piece of hardware in the strike group — never stopped working. The warship didn't break. What broke was the unglamorous stuff behind it: the port, the fuel depot, the supply chain nobody puts on a recruiting poster.

The consequences didn't stay in the Middle East, either. Relieving the Lincoln required pulling the USS George Washington — the Navy's only permanently forward-deployed carrier, normally stationed in Japan — out of the Pacific. That's one of the theaters the current administration's own National Defense Strategy names as a top military priority. As of this week, the Pacific still has no U.S. carrier presence; the best outside estimate puts its return sometime in late October or November.

The question was never really how many ports the U.S. has in the Middle East — a number a viral post got wrong to begin with. It's how many independent, survivable supply paths are left once an adversary starts probing for the obvious ones. Oddly enough, that question sent me back decades, to a project I worked on long before anyone was talking about carrier gaps, and to a career spent watching what happens when experience walks out the door.

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I'm not a military expert, and I'm not writing as one. I'm an engineer who spent a career asking a fairly narrow question — what happens to a system when the parts holding it up start to fail. That question doesn't stay inside the industries I actually worked in.

Years ago, I worked on a DARPA project studying how to link multiple semisubmersible platforms together, using hinge connections, to create a resilient offshore base for supplying military operations. The point was to solve the Lincoln's problem before anyone called it that: how do you keep an operation supplied when the fixed infrastructure you'd normally rely on is unavailable, too vulnerable, or too far away? The technology has moved on since then. The underlying constraint hasn't.

The back half of my career took me somewhere less exotic — into the oil field, and eventually into marine surveying, watching over projects to add a layer of experience the younger engineers on them hadn't earned yet. I used to joke I was making money off my gray hair. Clients weren't paying for someone who could still run the calculations — plenty of people could do that. They were paying for judgment built from watching a lot of projects succeed, fail, or nearly fail. The kind of thing that makes you say I've seen this before, we need to look at it, well before any procedure manual tells you to.

This isn't about older workers being better than younger ones — a resilient organization needs both; young engineers bring analytical tools and a fresh eye that experience alone doesn't. The failure happens when one generation walks out the door before its knowledge actually transfers to the next. Investigators looking into Deepwater Horizon didn't find that replacing experienced engineers with cheaper ones caused the blowout — that's a stronger claim than the evidence supports. What they found, repeatedly, was a failure of organizational learning: near-miss lessons that never got written down anywhere that mattered, safety findings from one facility that never reached the next. The procedures survived. The memory of why they existed didn't.

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That's really the whole argument: power and resilience aren't the same thing. A country's strength runs through an interconnected system — military logistics, industrial capacity, institutional knowledge, alliances, economic depth — and those pieces prop each other up when there's margin in the system, and drag each other down when there isn't. Redundant supply routes, spare manufacturing capacity, experienced people who cost more than their replacements — all of it looks like waste until the day it doesn't.

Take munitions, where the honest story cuts both ways. Tomahawk deliveries are reportedly up threefold over the past year — real output, not a contract sitting on paper, and it deserves to be said plainly. At the same time, manufacturing lead times for the weapons that would matter most in a prolonged conflict still run 25 to 51 months, about where they started. Both things are true at once, which is what a system under partial repair looks like: better, but not yet enough.

Or take Canada — a country whose military infrastructure is bound to ours through NORAD, whose defense industry is deeply woven into America's. As I write this, the relationship has taken a real turn for the worse: a trade dispute has escalated into tariffs and retaliation, and Canada's own prime minister has started talking about it in the language of an attack. Whatever you think of the trade fight on its own terms, it's a clean example of a decision made in one system — trade policy — landing as a cost in a completely different one: continental defense.

This piece leaves some things out on purpose. Along the way, the research kept opening onto questions about wealth concentration and how cultural conflict gets used to scramble ordinary political coalitions — real questions, with real evidence behind them, but not ones this piece can take on without turning into an argument about everything wrong with America at once. They'll get their own essay, if this one holds up.

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Which raises the real question: can the United States still absorb several shocks at once — military, economic, political — without solving today's problem by using up the redundancy it'll need for tomorrow's? Credit where it's due: the administration has already asked itself this question. The 2026 National Defense Strategy names what it calls the "simultaneity problem" — the risk of adversaries acting opportunistically across several theaters at once — and proposes leaning harder on allies as the answer. This isn't leadership failing to notice a problem everyone else could see.

What's harder to explain away is what's happened to institutional memory across government over the same stretch. The Army has gone without a confirmed Chief of Staff for months. The number of four-star billets has dropped from ten to five, the lowest in decades. And it isn't confined to the Pentagon: government auditors have separately documented FEMA losing roughly 4,300 staff in a single year — a 55 percent jump — to the point that the agency itself says it can no longer determine its own future staffing needs. The Office of Personnel Management lost more than a third of its workforce in fifteen months, and more than half of those who left had eleven years of experience or more. None of that comes from opinion writers. It comes from the government's own auditors, whose entire job is to document exactly this kind of thing.

My own read is that current leadership isn't showing the systems-level thinking this moment calls for. That's a judgment, not a fact, and I'll hold to the same rule the rest of this piece has tried to follow: the strongest evidence on the other side deserves to be said out loud, not quietly dropped. Every NATO member is now hitting the alliance's defense-spending target for the first time in its history. Munitions output is genuinely climbing. A country actually losing the capacity to respond wouldn't be doing either of those things.

I don't have a solution to offer, so I'll close with the question instead: do we still have the institutional capacity — and the leadership — to see the whole system clearly enough that solving today's crisis doesn't just create tomorrow's?