Major,

Solid piece. You and Gregg Roman are putting the real center of gravity on the table.

Tehran is not trying to sink the Lincoln with missiles right now. They are trying to sink the will that keeps her at sea and the recruiting base that will man the next one. Fabricating dead sailors, inventing mutiny, and laundering real fatigue into a “floating prison” narrative is classic fifth-generation work aimed straight at morale and the home front.

Your diagnosis is the part that matters most: we still answer a cognitive campaign with a second-generation toolkit—centralized messaging, delayed transparency, risk aversion, and the habit of treating information as a public-affairs problem instead of a primary warfighting domain. By the time the official denial comes out, the lie has already hardened and every real grievance video becomes “proof” of the cover-up.

The Lincoln crew’s 84.4 percent reenlistment rate is the strongest rebuttal available. That number should have been on the street early and often. Transparency is force protection in this kind of fight. We keep learning that lesson the hard way.

Morale is a warfighting domain. Tehran already treats it that way. Until our culture, personnel system, and information posture catch up, we will keep conceding the cognitive battlespace even while we dominate the technical one.

Appreciate you keeping the focus where it belongs.

BZ, Semper Fi and have a Blessed day Sir!!!