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JUST IN: The US Navy is investigating whether sailors aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford deliberately set fire to their own ship to end the deployment. That is the sentence. Read it again. The $13 billion carrier, the most expensive warship ever built, is now diverting to Souda Naval Base in Crete next week for refueling, repairs, and a formal investigation into the March 12 fire that damaged sections of the vessel and left more than 600 crew without proper sleeping quarters. Kathimerini, one of Greece’s most established daily newspapers, reported the details citing sources with direct knowledge of the planned port call. The investigation explicitly includes the possibility of deliberate sabotage by crewmembers. The Ford has been at sea since June 2025. Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jim Kilby told the Senate Armed Services Committee the deployment will run approximately 11 months, with return to Norfolk not expected until at least May. The crew was told they would be home months ago. They were extended. Then extended again. Then redirected into the largest Middle East military operation since 2003. And now some among them may have decided that fire was the only exit. If confirmed, this would be one of the most serious internal discipline events in the modern US Navy. A crew sabotaging its own vessel in a war zone does not happen because of poor food or bad weather. It happens when the institution has pushed human endurance past the point where the mission feels survivable. Eleven months at sea. Iranian drones striking Gulf airports daily. Eleven Reapers shot down in seventeen days. Gulf states pressing Washington not to stop but to escalate. No rotation ship. No relief force. No ceasefire on any horizon. And the carrier that embodies forward American naval power is pulling into a Greek port because 600 of its sailors have nowhere to sleep. The Crete diversion is the signal the market should be reading. The Ford is the only US carrier in the Gulf theatre. When it pulls into Souda, the sustained naval posture that was supposed to backstop convoy escorts, deter Iranian mining operations, and project power through the spring planting season temporarily loses its centrepiece. Repairs take days at minimum. Investigation takes longer. Every day the Ford sits in Crete is a day the Hormuz permissioned chokepoint operates without the threat of carrier-based air power overhead. After Crete, the Ford is expected to return to Gulf waters. The 11-month deployment timeline holds. But the sabotage investigation tells you something that no deployment order can override: the human beings inside the machine are breaking. The Mosaic Doctrine does not break. Provincial commanders do not file for shore leave. Standing orders do not need sleeping quarters. Mines do not experience morale collapse. The cheapest blockade in modern history runs on sealed packets and radio handsets while the most expensive warship in human history diverts to port because its own crew may have tried to burn their way home. The fertiliser trapped behind the permissioned strait does not care whether the Ford is in the Gulf or in Crete. The planting calendar does not pause for a sabotage investigation. And the 31 autonomous IRGC commands running the chokepoint do not need a $13 billion aircraft carrier to feel tired before they do. They were designed never to feel anything at all. Full analysis: open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
No Rebecca. They didn’t. And haven’t for over a year.
BREAKING: France has officially rejected Trump's request, saying it will not send warships to the Strait of Hormuz
Trump on NATO-"NATO is us. Putin fears us, he has no fear of Europe. He fears the United States of America."
Instability in the Middle East and U.S. involvement in Iran could continue until September, even if the war shifts to a low-intensity conflict, Iran shutting the strait of Hormuz means Washington has become more dug into the conflict-AXIOS
