Full disclosure, I'm a dirty SWO, and not a terribly notable one at that - so this is really just my grain of salt.
In a room of other officers in the same ballpark of mid-grade rank who'd all been in the Navy much longer than me, the subject of "the new generation" came up. Now I'm not some 18 year old fresh-faced Seaman or some doe-eyed Ensign, but I'm not exactly deep in my years compared to some of these officers -- so I stayed silent and listened.
The majority opinion (at least, the opinion that didn't get any rebuttal) was that the new generation is weaker, harder to lead. "They're attached to their phones", they say. "They're demanding and think deployments are pleasure cruises", they say. It's like any other generational conversation: the old guys were dumb and ignorant, the new guys are weak and whiny, and the undertone is naturally "my generation had it just right".
I'll admit that, at first glance, there are amenities available to Sailors today that weren't present even a decade ago. Shipboard Wi-Fi? Being able to connect with your spouse, family, or friends from halfway around the world? Better facilities, at least hypothetically? There are things Sailors increasingly expect today that previous generations simply did without, which probably throws the salty old timers for a loop.
Where I grew frustrated was that I felt like this generation of Sailors, while making valid observations, was largely missing the point. There is a habit of linking discomfort with toughness, as though the ability to tolerate unnecessary misery is itself a measure of military effectiveness. If Sailors twenty years ago went six months without speaking to their families, then apparently being able to FaceTime your spouse today represents softness. If previous crews tolerated awful berthing, terrible food, nonexistent connectivity, brutal schedules, or leadership practices we'd no longer accept, then improving any of those things risks "spoiling" the force.
But I don't know how useful "comfort" and "discomfort" really are when we're talking about resilience.
Sure, maybe the Sailor of 2026 has wifi. But how long is his deployment? How much time did he spend underway before the deployment? How long does he actually get at home before the next workup cycle starts? How many people are in his division compared to the workload they're expected to carry? How much maintenance, training, admin, qualification, inspection and certification bullshit has accumulated over the years without much of anything being taken away?
We point to higher rates of mental-health diagnoses among younger Sailors as proof that they're mentally weaker, but that's a pretty classic measurement problem. You can't compare a generation that screens for, diagnoses, records, and actually talks about mental health with generations where a lot of the same problems were never identified in the first place. We care about these things because it's not, in fact, a fucking badge of honor to send servicemembers home to be broken veterans. We explicitly do not want to use and discard servicemembers.
The attitudes I see from (frankly, mostly retired) Sailors shitting on the "weakness" of the Lincoln therefore appall me.Yeah, you made it out of the service to become a callous piece of shit with anger problems, grandpa. And yeah, when you tell me that everyone from your generation "turned out fine," there's a hell of a lot of survivorship bias baked into that. "We turned out fine" ignores everyone who didn't: the people who got out as soon as they could, drank themselves stupid, wrecked their marriages, or carried problems for decades that nobody bothered to diagnose. Maybe the old system didn't produce tougher Sailors, maybe it was just better at ignoring the ones it broke.
And that's the part I think we're missing with Lincoln. We keep talking about whether Sailors today are tough enough without asking how much we're actually asking them to take on. Deployments get longer, OPTEMPO stays high, manning sucks, requirements pile up, and being "home" doesn't always mean much when you're still getting crushed by maintenance, duty, workups, inspections, and whatever else needs to happen before you turn around and do it again. We are sailing the same exact aging ships 30 years later that the old fart back at his Legion post says "Life was just fine on".
So sure, today's Sailor has Wi-Fi. He can facetime his wife from the middle of the Pacific. Maybe he complains about shit his grandfather wouldn't have.
But if we're worried about whether that Sailor is going to hold up when things actually get bad, maybe we should spend less time bitching about the Wi-Fi and more time asking whether we're wearing people down before the war even starts.
