USS Abraham Lincoln after docking in Laem Chabang port in Thailand
When the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln finally limped into the Thai port of Laem Chabang after an unbroken stint of 286 days at sea, the corporate media and defence commentators were seized by the visible layer of rust coating the ship from bow to stern. Mainstream analysts interpreted these indecorous and embarrassing signs of decay as the consequences of inadequate naval logistics, overextended supply chains, procurement backlogs, and insufficient maintenance budgets.
If we do not suppose too much insight and veritas by allowing so, perhaps deliberately they chose not to see what was happening above decks as a symbol of what was going on below them. While commentators counted days and calculated maritime supply lines, they did not comment on or ignored the broader implications of the crew’s predicament – specifically, the deeper meanings associated with the fact that the ship’s 5,000 sailors and Marines were having to endure broken plumbing, food shortages, and severe psychological strains that provoked some crew members to attempt suicide by jumping overboard.
Mistaken or Disregarded Appearances
The overlooked or deliberately ignored implications point to what would be a predictable outcome of the domestic-geopolitical equation I recently proposed here. The basis of my position is that modern national security has little or nothing to do with the much-trumpeted binary of “autocracy versus democracy;” whereas it has a great deal to do with a state’s relationship with its own population – in particular, how it regards and manages poverty.
While China treats the eradication of domestic deprivation as a non-negotiable necessity for the maintenance of state power and social cohesion, by design, savage capitalism in the US produces systemic exploitation and neglect. That, in turn, creates a permanent, dispossessed domestic underclass. It is from this underclass that poor and minority youth are recruited to staff an overextended US global military machine.
Two Ships, Two Contracts
To understand the structural injustices and failings exposed aboard the Lincoln, I find myself looking back sixty years to my own youth. From 1962 to 1966, I was a naval cadet aboard the UK training ship HMS Conway where I completed my final years of high school. By my time on the ship, it had become the “stone frigate,” having transferred ashore to buildings on the Marquis of Anglesey’s estate in North Wales after its original home – the wooden ship-of-the-line (pictured) of the same name – went aground and later caught fire in the Menai Straits.
Painting of HMS Conway in the Menai Straits before she went aground, by Alistair Lang
HMS Conway on the Menai Strait by David Dixon
Conway was a striking example of Erving Goffman’s “total institution”.
Following Smith (2006), Goffman’s definition of the total institution begins with the assertion that in modern societies, the “daily round” of individuals normally involves a separation of places and times for work, sleep, and play. The total institution is a type of social organization that breaks down the barriers that usually separate these three realms of activity.
The four “common characteristics” of total institutions are identified by Goffman as being: (1) the daily round is now situated “in the same place and under the same authority” (at Conway, as with other total institutions, there were two main sources of authority: in the approved official structure, enforcement was in the hands of senior cadets – or cadet captains – who presided over other cadets from a “gun room” where they meted out severe punishments in the form of floggings with a “teaser;” in parallel was an informal structure run by “Quarter Boys” or final year cadets who had not been made cadet captains); (2) activities are performed with a “batch” of others; (3) activities are timetabled and sequenced by clear rules and a class of officials – when, where, and what to eat; when to wake up and go to sleep (at Conway, this was done to bugle calls); when and where to work and play; what clothes to wear and when; where walking is permissible and where it is not (at Conway, there were “doubling areas” on the school grounds where it was a punishable offence to walk); and so on; (4) all of the scheduled activities are part of a plan designed to subdue and discipline the inmates and to realize the goals of the institution.
By virtue of its nearly absolute control of inmate conduct, the total institution is the pinnacle of organizational tyranny and coercion. It segregates inmates from the wider society and enforces batch living that is in sharp contrast to the domestic realities of everyday family life.
Yet, the institutional experiences of a Conway cadet and a modern Lincoln sailor were structurally opposed in crucial ways.
The distinctions lie in class, choice, legal obligation, and institutional intent. On the Conway, inmates were drawn largely from backgrounds of relative privilege; and many (like me) were from families that had moved to British colonies in Africa and elsewhere. We were there by choice (or at least, parental choice). Conway conditioned (in the Skinnerian sense) and groomed us for careers as officers in the merchant marine, which with few exceptions (me among them) most boys chose to follow. The discipline was severe, but the daily rigours of institutional membership were made tolerable by the knowledge that they would produce significant and secure career rewards. It was generally considered to be a hard but fair and worthwhile bargain.
The crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln operates under an entirely different arrangement. They are the products of what amounts to a modern “poverty draft” – compelled not by a press-gang, but by the just as insistent and callous structural coercion of a capitalist system that leaves them with few other avenues for achieving basic human security.
But of course, our comparison involves a much more profound asymmetry: while a Conway cadet was bound by voluntary enrolment – always subject to the civilian right of parental withdrawal – the modern US recruit enlists legally under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Once signed, the poverty draft contract of military service becomes a form of state-enforced bondage. According to military law, a sailor cannot simply resign from the service. It is a criminal offence to walk away before your time is up.
In the circumstances that prevailed on the Lincoln, it is not difficult to see why jumping overboard and other forms of despair and dissent become increasingly rational choices or forms of what Goffman calls radical and calculated “secondary adjustment”.
When the US state leaves sailors at sea for months on end to project imperial might, to keep them there and doing what they are told, it banks on severe legal jeopardy and the fact that they have no civilian safety net to return to. While the total institution of the Conway was designed to cultivate future leaders, the Lincoln version treats its working-class crew as automatons or expendable components to be run at full throttle until just before they break. Sometimes, as in the Lincoln case, miscalculations concerning the tolerance thresholds can lead to boil overs.
In my view, the significance of what happened on the USS Abraham Lincoln lies in the fact that it is a microcosm of how the US military system as a whole will react to extreme pressure, and much less in the deficiencies of military planning, logistics, supply chains, and the quality of plumbing on board US aircraft carriers.
An Already Bad Deal Dishonoured
Total institutions are clearly not designed to be fun. Their all-encompassing demands are sustained by an exchange that depends for its maintenance on a delicate (and, usually, grossly unjust) equilibrium. They push inmates to the limits of their tolerance to achieve their aims. Such institutions require complete submission and obedience, often until death do them part. And in return, to preserve the equilibrium and an acceptable level of performance, they offer carefully calibrated (minimal) measures of basic physical sustenance and safeguards for the rudiments of individual dignity.
Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the capitalist state broke its side of this measly bargain. When deployments are extended beyond normal limits without port visits, and conditions on board deteriorate to the extent that they did, the “single rational plan” ceases to be a reasonable exchange and mutates into indefinite, punitive confinement or imprisonment. If there was ever any doubt that the institution’s care was contrived, the material aspects of life on board – broken plumbing, incessant noise, constant threat of drone and missile attacks, long shifts and heavy workloads, foul water, and food rationing – removed it, demonstrating empirically that it had ceased to exercise its minimalist ‘care’ for the batch and had begun to exploit them more intensively and remorselessly. As the already lopsided contract began to unravel, Goffman’s concept of the “underlife” took a radical and more ominous turn.
Goffman observed that inmates are never completely passive. As suggested above, they construct an underlife of secondary adjustments that is designed to help them cope – unauthorized practices that allow them to bypass institutional rules, express limited defiance, and preserve a sense of self. In total institutions like HMS Conway and the USS Abraham Lincoln, under normal circumstances, this underlife manifests as minor rebellions: the smuggling of contraband, the creation of insubordinate slang and nick names (a rotund member of staff at Conway was known as “The Gonk”), the formation of close and long-lasting bonds of friendship forged in the trenches, or the construction of hidden spaces away from the officers’ view. These small acts of defiance act as a vital pressure release valve.
But aboard the Lincoln, the pressure valve had been welded shut by unusually lengthy isolation, overwork, and neglect. When an underclass is trapped at sea with no legal exit and no civilian safety net to return to, and, at the same time, the institution strips away the bare minimum requirements for human dignity, everyday acts of petty defiance lose their capacity to absorb the pressures exerted by the institution and the traditional boundary between minor subversion and outright rejection dissolves. The defiance and coping mechanisms mutate into open revolt.
When sailors begin systematically to sabotage equipment, refuse orders, or resort to attempting to jump into the ocean to escape the enclosure, the subculture has transformed. It is no longer just an underlife designed to make life aboard more bearable; it is a collective, structural refusal to participate in the rational plan.
Like it or not, the systemic collapse of compliance on board the USS Abraham Lincoln amounted to mutiny.
The Cost of Imperial Neglect
In the view presented here, it is not so much the rusting hull of the USS Abraham Lincoln per se that serves as a clear warning to the US ruling class, but what it signifies and conceals. National security cannot simply be purchased by building multi-billion-dollar ships. If the state simultaneously over-exploits the people required to operate them, then, in so doing, it sabotages its own national security. By treating domestic poverty as a useful tool for recruiting vulnerable – and therefore pliable – service men and women rather than a systemic failure, the US state and its military apparatus have incurred a deep and self-inflicted wound.
Without over-dramatising them, the brawls between crew members that took place in Pattaya can be seen as further expressions of the pent-up frustrations of institutional inmates who have had more than they can take and not merely as typical and to-be-expected shore-leave rowdiness by boisterous sailors – as they have tended to be portrayed by the mainstream media.
If, as seems likely, the US blunders into a high-stakes, protracted military conflict with an adversary like China – whose resilience draws on a cohesive, state-protected social fabric and an ancient civilisation – the US military machine will find that its greatest vulnerability is not a lack of advanced weaponry or strained maritime supply lines. The main threat to the US state is the deep domestic social anomie and rot that it has created and chosen to ignore, which, when subjected to the pressures of a major war, may well cause the state to break apart from within.
My interest in these matters should not be interpreted as an attempt to save the US state and its military from themselves. This is clearly not an argument for clamping down harder. Rather, my hope, however forlorn, is that the US state and others like it recognize that they carry within them the seeds of their own destruction and that their salvation lies in revolutionizing a system that is designed to serve the interests of a few into one that serves the common good.