The commander of the U.S. military’s Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, visited with service members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as part of a 10-day trip to the region, CENTCOM said Saturday.
Adm. Brad Cooper met with sailors and Marines on the aircraft carrier, during which he “addressed the entire Lincoln team and thanked them for their tremendous dedication and courage,” CENTCOM reported.
The Lincoln, which has about 5,000 service members and is based out of San Diego, has been deployed since November 2025, first in the Pacific and then to the Middle East prior to the Iran war. U.S. military vessels are normally deployed for about six months.
The visit to the aircraft carrier, Cooper’s second of the year according to CENTCOM, comes after several families of deployed Lincoln service members expressed frustration in recent weeks over the mental health struggles faced by some aboard the ship.
“They should not be deployed this long,” Jefferson Kelley, whose son Jackson is aboard the Lincoln on his first-ever deployment, told CBS News Friday. “These are old ships. It’s not like they’re even state-of-the-art. And they take a lot of maintenance, a lot of work. It’s around the clock.”
CBS News reported Friday that the USS George Washington aircraft carrier was headed to the Middle East to relieve the Lincoln.
Senate Democrats sent a letter Wednesday to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanding answers about the conditions aboard the Lincoln.
“The Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is a strong team of high-achieving Americans standing tall with immense, justified pride in everything they accomplished,” Cooper said in a statement. “History will record this deployment as one of the most operationally intense and consequential of the modern era.”
Asked Friday if he thought the Lincoln’s deployment was too long, President Trump responded that it was “not nearly long enough.”
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