No Margin Left: Overworked Carrier Force Struggles to Maintain Deployments - USNI News

From January through Oct. 31, U.S. carriers had spent a combined total of 855 days at sea – 258 days more than all of 2019, according to a USNI News analysis of carrier deployments over the last five years.

That heavy carrier usage makes 2020 the busiest year for the carrier fleet since the Arab Spring, forcing some carriers to stay on station for record-length deployments and conduct double-pumps even as others are sidelined and can’t contribute to the workload.

The National Defense Strategy in January 2018 called on the military to prioritize building up readiness and lethality for a future fight over routine low-end operations today, giving the Navy something it hadn’t had in almost two decades: a reprieve from keeping an aircraft carrier in the Middle East.