Mutiny on the Gerald Ford
Key Markets report for Friday, 27 February 2026
It appears that the U.S. is now relearning the lessons of overextending and unbalancing itself through excessive reliance on its armed forces. This has always been one of the Achilles heels of empires through history and the United States is not exempted from these limitations. Even the greatest fighting force in history of the Milky Way galaxy is manned by ordinary humans who come with limited endurance, attitudes, opinions and fragile morale.
The golden rule of military engagements has always been, “do not issue orders that can’t be obeyed.” Can’t or won’t - it’s the same: such orders expose cracks in the military’s armor and can trigger a contagion of refusals and even mutinies. Of course, in the military, refusing to obey orders is a short-cut to getting court martialed, getting discharged dishonorably, or even facing a firing squad.
For those reasons, armies seldom mutiny openly. Instead, they may arrange acts of self-sabotage with plausible deniability: they simply make sure that the key equipment fails at just the right time to make sure that the orders they don’t wish to obey can’t be obeyed. US Navy’s current issues in the Eastern Mediterranean are one of the many such episodes and one of the six history lessons political decision-makers should (but won’t) heed.
1. USS Gerald Ford internally sinking
This may be the reason behind the maintenance issues onboard of USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), the world’s largest aircraft carrier. Yesterday, the carrier departed Souda Bay, Crete for Israeli shores, apparently in support of Israel in the possible future conflict against Iran. This deployment is following on the back of the carrier’s earlier mission against Venezuela in the Caribbean. The carrier’s continuous deployment has now exceeded eight months and could extend to 10-11 months, potentially breaking post-Vietnam era records for U.S. carrier deployments.
This has raised concerns about crew fatigue, morale impacts (e.g., missed family events like funerals, weddings, and births), and deferred major maintenance/upgrade periods originally scheduled in dry dock. The most prominently reported issue involves the ship’s 650 toilets for over 4,000 crew members. Apparently, the vacuum collection, holding, and transfer (VCHT) sanitation system has broken down, causing problems like blocked up toilets, sewage overflows, and long waits for the working toilets (up to 45 minutes, apparently). As some in the social media commentariat put it, the ship is sinking internally, in its own excrement! Not great for the troops’ morale.
Apparently, the issues were self-inflicted: fatigued troops who aren’t looking forward to going to war for Israel, thousands of miles from the U.S. shores, stuffed t-shirts and socks into toilets to deliberately cause the sewage problem. Officially, the ship ship continues high-readiness operations under U.S. Central Command, including “deterrence against Iran and protection of regional allies.” Unless, of course, other and more debilitating issues crop up in the coming days. There are many examples of such passive refusal, even just in the last few years.
2. The Grounding of USNS Big Horn
On 23 September 2024 (with reports emerging on September 24, 2024), the USNS Big Horn (T-AO-198), a fleet replenishment oiler sustained underwater damage as a result of grounding - a collision with an underwater object in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Oman, within the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations. The ship had to be towed to a port in Oman for repairs that were expected to take months. The case highlighted broader U.S. Navy logistics vulnerabilities due to the limited number of such oilers.
The USNS Big Horn was the sole dedicated replenishment oiler supporting the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group (CSG), and its stranding left the strike group unable to sustain extended operations. At the time, the Abraham Lincoln was deployed in the Arabian Sea/Gulf of Oman region in support of Israel’s conflicts against Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah, and in protection of maritime navigation in the Red Sea.
3. USS Harry Truman crashes in the Med
On 12 February 2025, USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) collided with a Panamanian-flagged commercial vessel Besiktas-M, near Port Said, just north of the Suez Canal entrance. At the time, the carrier was returning to the Red Sea to resume combat operations following a scheduled maintenance at Naval Support Activity Souda Bay, Crete (from 6 February 2025).
Before this, he carrier spent about 50 days in the Red Sea as part of its extended deployment conducting combat operations against the Houthis. After the collision, USS Harry S. Truman had to return to Souda Bay for repairs and the Navy’s investigation revealed that the incident was avoidable and due to navigation errors by the ship’s bridge team. But not all refusals involve physical sabotage. Many take form of information breaches.
4. The Pentagon springs a leak
On Monday, 10 April 2023, Washington Post broke the story about “leaked” Pentagon documents (”U.S. doubts Ukraine counteroffensive will yield big gains, leaked document says.“). The story showed that the western officials and the media consistently lied to the public about the progress of the war in Ukraine. Namely, only three days after the news story came out, the FBI identified and apprehended the supposed leaker, the 21-year old Jack Texeira, member of the 102nd Intelligence Wing of U.S. Air Force, based at Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
But it was almost incinceivable that the young airman could have had access to the documents he supposedly leaked, some of which were marked “Top Secret.” As the former CIA officer Larry Johnson put it, “no one on a US military base anywhere in the world would have access to such information.” Another former intelligence officer, Ray McGovern weighed in with a startling hypothesis: “only somebody very, very senior, somebody at the upper reaches of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the National Intelligence Director could have had access to internal CIA documents...”
The troubling implication was that the “leak” was no whistleblower action but a controlled and purposeful release of highly classified information. McGovern:
“I’m not alone in suggesting that... what is possible is that a very high level Defence Department people who want to blow the whistle on these sophomores who are advising Biden... [it’s] one faction of leadership in the White House and especially at the Joint Chiefs of Staff who don’t want this damn thing to end up in a nuclear exchange.”
McGovern’s take was corroborated by the Deputy head of the Pentagon Colin Kall who stated, “We do not want a direct conflict with Russia in Ukraine, we do not want a third world war.” This was a clear sign of dissent within the ranks and a call to rein in the Biden administration’s reckless policies.
5. Slamming the brakes on a Vietnam War escalation
In the above-linked interview, Ray McGovern recounted another, similar incident from the Vietnam era in 1969. At a time when it was already clear that the Vietcong were winning the war, General Westmoreland sought to escalate it further by requesting an additional 206,000 troops he needed to push deep into North Vietnam and reach the Chinese border.
President Lyndon Johnson was inclined to approve the request (later he said that he was going to do this), but a document leak from the Pentagon sabotaged Westmoreland by exposing the real state of affairs in the Vietnam War: that the U.S. was losing and the Vietcong winning. The whistleblower turned out to be Leslie Gelb, 3rd most senior official in the Defense Department at the time.
Our last example shows that by issuing commands that can’t/won’t be obeyed, military commanders - up to the Commander-in-Chief - take personal risk, including with their own life.
6. Hitler’s generals plan his assassination
As we discussed in a recent TrendCompass report, on 21 April 1938 Adolf Hitler ordered General Wilhelm Keitel to draft plans to invade Czechoslovakia. At that time, it was well understood that Czechoslovakia’s army was far superior to German Wehrmacht and Hitler’s top generals were so alarmed at Hitler’s orders that a group of them, clustered around Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff, General Ludwig Beck, hatched a three phase plan to sabotage the Fuehrer’s reckless pursuit. The third phase of the plan, if the first two failed, was to simply kill Hitler.
Soldiers will fight if they believe…
All these lessons of history are very relevant to today’s events and the way they might unfold going forward. In discussing geopolitics, many analysts regard militaries as dumb mules that will carry out any and all orders issued by the command-and-control hierarchy. But this is not always the case: troops are not always motivated to carry out orders they disagree with.
Today, U.S. troops may see no reason why they should risk their lives to fight Iran, a nation that hasn’t attacked anyone in over three centuries, in order to support Israel, a nation that’s been at wars almost permanently since its creation and that’s planning more wars against more enemies in the future, implying that even if the mission against Iran today is carried out successfully, their reward could be further deployments tomorrow. It’s hard to believe in a cause that can never be accomplished.
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Today’s trading signals
With yesterday’s closing prices we have the following changes for the Key Markets portfolio:
