September 25, 2026: Several aircraft carriers have spent more time at sea than the normal 180-day/six-month tour. Carrier sailors are told that tours may be longer, depending on the situation. Sailors can easily see that the longest deployment was 332 days aboard the carrier Midway off Vietnam in the 1970s.

This brings us back to the 2026 media uproar when sailors recently complained about the 266 days the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) spent at sea. Everyone on the carrier was without shore leave for 250 days, except for two brief port calls that didn’t allow many sailors ashore. Families of sailors reported emails and phone calls revealing extreme fatigue, mental health problems, and difficulties getting sailors to concentrate on their work. Meanwhile, earlier this year the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) spent 326 days at sea before returning to the Norfolk Virginian shipyard for maintenance. Six years ago, the carrier Lincoln was at sea for 295 days.

Normally, carriers get brief shore leave every month or so. At the same time, the senior sailors, especially the Chiefs and the COB (senior Chief of the Boat), will warn sailors that, depending on the global situation, carriers can be forced to stay at sea for as long as it takes. Sailor recruits soon learned this policy, and a recruit with a relative who has served remembers stories of extremely long tours at sea and how sailors are repeatedly told this is what they signed up for and that they should suck it up and earn their pay.

Earlier, the U.S. Navy adopted a policy of adjusting its ship schedules so that crews spend at least half their time in port. This is called "dwell time." With about 60 percent of Navy personnel married, time in port matters. The Navy has already eliminated its decades-old policy of six-month deployments at sea. These deployments were far away and kept sailors cut off from home. The current policy keeps ships closer to their home port, making it easier to "surge" more warships in an emergency. In the past, ships returning from a six-month cruise usually needed a month or so of maintenance and repairs in port, with much of the crew taking leave. Military personnel get 30 days of leave (vacation) each year. Thus, ships returning from the old six-month cruises were out of action for a month or more. This policy eliminated most of that, and more ships were always available. The new 50/50 policy uses many shorter trips. Carriers only go out for a week or two at a time, so their crews can get some practice.