Oh No Did Pete Hegseth Forget That Sailors Like Food?
Everyone knows hunger is a great motivator.
Whatever else one can say about America’s military — its budget is ridiculously bloated, it is geared towards missions that are now outdated, its ranks are crawling with white supremacists and warmongers indistinguishable in character from Buck Turgidson — one area where it has always impressed is logistics.
Take the Navy. Moving thousands of people and all the materials needed to keep its sailors functioning and its ships in seaworthy shape all around the world is an arduous undertaking to which the Navy devotes a great deal of resources. Having to run complex logistics in an active war zone when the ships are running combat operations around the clock is even more complicated. It is one function in which militaries that do it well take a particular amount of pride.
Which is why this story in USA Today about how the ships that have spent the last seven weeks fighting America’s stupid and useless war on Iran are running out of food is so enraging.
The story focuses more on families frustrated that care packages they are trying to send to their loved ones in the war zone are not being delivered. The reason, ostensibly, is that mail delivery was suspended in April “due to airspace closures and other logistical impacts from the ongoing conflict.” So packages filled with homemade baked goods, extra toothpaste, and whatever other treats families feel like sending are piling up in warehouses until the military decides to deliver them.
But for our money, the main question the story should actually be asking is why the Navy isn’t supplying its ships with enough fucking food in the first place.
Seriously, look at this shit. We don’t expect the mess of an amphibious assault ship to be a Michelin three-starred restaurant. But we do think the sailors should get better than a handful of boiled carrots, something that we think is some sort of meat patty, and whatever that third thing is, a boot sole or walrus skin or something someone scraped off the inside of the engine cowling of an F-18, who can say:
That picture comes from a sailor on the USS Abraham Lincoln and would gross out old Abe himself. And he grew up in an era where everyone ate wood.
And if you are wondering what happened to all those millions of dollars’ worth of goodies like lobster tails the military was buying last fall, we don’t have an answer. Probably they all got sent to Pete Hegseth’s house so he could put some food in his stomach after guzzling several cases of champagne in a weekend.
PREVIOUSLY!
We spent an inordinate amount of Friday morning scouring social media to try and figure out whom to blame for America’s sailors eating like they are imprisoned in a supermax. What we found was a wide range of opinions!
Some of the more gung-ho military types on BlueSky, for example, claim that what you are seeing in the above picture is pretty normal on ships that have been at sea for a long time that are starting to run low on supplies. Throw in the added factor that supply lines in the Middle East are massively borked by the disruptions from the war, and of course ships aren’t getting their “bougie” resupplies. But this is how we all ate when stuck on a base in Kuwait for six months in 1991, so everyone should just shut up and quit whining.
PREVIOUSLY TOO!
On the other side, the less gung-ho types posit that planning and preparation for the war was rushed and crammed into way too short a timeframe. The leaders who decided to go to war did not give the military nearly enough time to move more supplies into the region. They did not give planners time to game out possible supply line disruptions caused by stuff like Iran launching ballistic missiles at our ports and bases in the region, and to think of possible solutions to those problems.
Faced with these competing narratives, we have decided to go with whichever explanation blames Donald Trump and the nation’s dorkiest Secretary of Defense, Pete (Hic!) Hegseth. Those two clowns have, no matter what they tell you, zero respect for the military. They have zero respect for the disruptions to military personnel and their families caused by extended deployments for ill-thought-out combat actions. They just think, Yarrrrrrgh! Warfighters don’t need food! America’s warfighters are killing machines who only care about the mission and will endure any hardship to accomplish it! No DEI! Lethality! War boners!
If those two braindead fucksticks did actually care about the military instead of their own personal glory, and if they had any conception of other people as fully realized human beings with needs, they would have recognized that leaving ships at sea for months without breaks or repairs or resupply physically degrades the ships and the people running them, to say nothing of the mental strains on the latter.
And yet, the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford just set a mark for longest deployment since the Vietnam era. The ship was not planning to break that record when it left its homeport in Virginia 10 months ago and sailed to the Mediterranean. But after time in the Med, it was sent to Venezuela to participate in that military operation. Then it was immediately sent back across the Atlantic to bomb Iran without a break.
A few weeks ago, the Ford even suffered a shipboard fire that reportedly wrecked enough sleeping quarters that hundreds of its 6,000 crew members were sleeping on tables and floors. It probably should have been pulled out of service and docked for repair work, but that might have caused Trump to have to slightly pause bombing Iranian civilians. And we know how much he loves killing brown people.
How piss-poor must morale be on ships where there is zero end to the mission in sight and a lump of shredded meat and a single tortilla constitutes a meal? It’s not even Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins’s “chicken, tortilla, one piece broccoli, one other thing.” It doesn’t have the one piece broccoli and one other thing!
That morale is probably very piss-poor! And that is when mistakes get made. Which is fine when it’s us making a typo. It is less fine when it is sailors at sea handling sophisticated weapons and trying not to steer their ships into each other.
The sailors on these ships are going to have some great stories. And by great, we mean we already are mad thinking about them.
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More people in the armed forces need to speak out on this. Because right now, if you're among those people, you should know Pete Hegseth HATES your ass.
I've been to prison. That is legitimately a jail lunch. Maybe a little worse. Didn't this Hegseth asshole buy a bunch of lobster recently or something on taxpayer dime?
There's an old joke. In the seventies, a US general and a Soviet general meet at some sort of conference and are having a bragging contest. The Soviet says, (supply your own accent) "Soviet soldiers are best treated army ever! Every day, every soldier gets 1,000 calories to eat!"
American general scoffs and says, "Pfft! Our soldiers get three to five thousand calories a day!"
To which the Soviet general says "Hah! Now I know you are lying capitalist! Nobody can eat that many potatoes!"
Repeat now, with the American playing the role of the Soviet and a Chinese general as the American.