Unhappy Sailors

Hunger on the carriers of a dying empire

Stanislav Krapivnik on the collapse of the US empire and its starving navy.

In the United States, disintegration has begun within the armed forces themselves—this time in the navy, in the very forces that are supposed to project the power of the “great” hegemon across the world.

What started as a scandal on the aircraft carrier Ford has now spread throughout the entire fleet. This is not about the mold found all over the ship (a well-known problem on all American vessels). Nor is it about the shortage of carrots, or the fact that they are poorly prepared, or that the fleet still has the same mission as during the Cold War while itself having been cut in half—resulting in longer shifts and longer deployments.

Nor is it about the clogged toilets, cases of which on the Ford reached 80%. No, this is not about that mild form of mutiny in which sailors start throwing ropes and T-shirts into the systems to damage them and force the ship back to port. We are also not discussing the mysterious fire that took 30 hours to extinguish and that looked more like a missile strike than an accident caused by an overheated washing machine.

No, this scandal began on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, but has now manifested itself on every ship in the U.S. armed forces.

What am I talking about? The inability to adequately feed the sailors.

Of all the U.S. services, the navy, under normal conditions, used to feed its people better than anyone else. But it seems that for the United States this is already a thing of the past.

From my contacts, I have learned that the problem has already spread throughout the entire fleet. One mother told me that her son, a healthy Marine, came home after five months on a ship 15 kilograms lighter.

Judging by the photographs sailors post online, the portions they receive look like 1,800–2,000 calories. For a normal healthy man that is simply not enough; for physically active men it is critically low.

For a department with a trillion-dollar budget, everything points to total corruption. This kind of situation usually appears on the brink of an empire’s collapse, when everyone is simply grabbing whatever they can. Families have started sending care packages with food to their relatives. But those packages never reach the service members either. They disappear somewhere along the way.

All the signs—economic, military, systemic—point to collapse. The only question is what steps we are prepared to take so that the dying American empire does not try to destroy everyone and everything as it dies.

(Translated from the Russian)