What the USS Abraham Lincoln Teaches Us About Power at Sea

I read that nearly 5,000 men and women have been kept aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln for more than 250 days, that this ship has been “continuously at sea for a record length of nearly seven months”, and that life aboard has come to moldy showers, broken toilets, weeks without laundry, long stretches without hot water, and a meal reduced to half a cup of rice and two tortillas. I read, too, of exhaustion, “declining mental health and morale”, of suicidal ideation, of at least one sailor attempting to jump overboard from “severe burnout”, and of another going overboard and needing to be recovered and removed for further care. One need not be a seaman to understand that something has gone gravely wrong.

Nor does the concern rest only on private complaints. Senators have written to the secretary of defense that these reports “warrant immediate attention” and raise the broader question whether the Navy can sustain “the operational tempo now being demanded of its carrier force”. Another legislator has asked that a delegation be permitted to go aboard to “conduct oversight investigation into this horrible situation”, insisting there is “no reason to be denied access”. Yet, so far as these reports tell, that access has not been granted. Here, then, we have not only harsh conditions, but resistance to an impartial inquiry into their cause and necessity.

When I wrote my Second Treatise of Government, I began by observing that all men are naturally in “a state of perfect freedom” under the law of nature, equal and independent, where no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. On that understanding, any authority which sets some above others must justify itself as improving the condition of those who submit to it. Political power, as I then defined it, is only the right to make and execute laws for the public good, and for no other end. A government, or a captain at sea, has no right to any man’s person beyond what free and equal persons might reasonably consent to for their safety.

It will be said that these sailors consented: they volunteered, they entered into service, they accepted discipline, they knew warlike tasks might be hard. I grant it. Yet consent to hardship is not consent to any hardship whatsoever; consent to command is not consent to be used up. Even in the state of nature, men may not drive their servants to the point of self-destruction; how then should a public officer, who acts in God’s stead for the preservation of the community, claim leave to arrange matters so that his subordinates sink into despair, attempt escape by throwing themselves into the sea, or live without decent food, sanitation, or rest? Such conditions do not merely inconvenience; they threaten life, health, and liberty, and so cross the bounds of the law of nature.

Here some will plead necessity and what you now call national security. The ship, they will say, enforces an “indefinite” blockade against a dangerous power; she must remain at sea; the strain on the fleet requires extraordinary measures; nice regard for comfort must yield. I am not ignorant that emergencies sometimes justify what I called prerogative: the exercise of power without, or even contrary to, the standing rule, when the public good manifestly requires it. But prerogative is held on trust. It is tolerable only while it plainly serves the public and remains visibly answerable to the people’s representatives. The moment those who wield it refuse inspection by an independent authority, and insist on being judges in their own case, it ceases to be prerogative and becomes arbitrary power.

The refusal, or even delay, of legislative oversight in this matter is therefore more alarming to me than the broken plumbing. Mold can be scrubbed and pipes repaired; but when those who command 5,000 lives at sea can both create harsh conditions and then block the very inquiry that would determine whether those conditions are necessary, you have joined in one hand the power to harm and the power to excuse that harm. That is the very definition of what I once called a “state of war” between ruler and ruled: not constant gunfire, but the establishment of a power that may dispose of men’s persons without recourse to a known standing law and an impartial judge.

I do not say that a single voyage, however mismanaged, dissolves a government. I argued long ago that resistance is justified only when there is “a long train of abuses” all tending the same way, to the destruction of a people’s property in the broad sense— their lives, liberties, and estates. Yet the reports here already speak of an “operational tempo now being demanded” of the whole carrier force, of the claim that a blockade can be sustained “indefinitely”, of thousands of military members living under similar strain. If a nation allows this pattern to settle— ever-longer deployments, ever-harsher conditions, ever-weaker oversight— it will have accustomed itself to a quiet tyranny in uniform, and discovered too late that the law no longer follows its flag onto the sea.

The remedy need not be chaos, for the dissolution of a particular exercise of power is not the dissolution of society. A people may insist on strict limits to deployment length, on enforceable standards of sustenance and sanitation, on unimpeded access for their representatives to inquire, without thereby unravelling their defense. They do not thereby rebel; they merely recall their servants to the terms of the trust. If that trust continues to be broken— if human beings, the workmanship of one Maker, are spent as if they were fuel— then those aboard such ships will be justified in demanding more than kind words. At some point, there is no appeal left on earth. Then, as ever, there remains only an appeal to heaven.