Garrison Davis

The fire caused $400 million in damage and led to the vessel being decommissioned two years later.

The contractor was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Naval sabotage was an even bigger business during the latter stages of the war in Vietnam.

In December of 1972, Jeffrey Allison, a 19-year-old sailor from Oakland, was sentenced to five years in prison for lighting a fire aboard an aircraft carrier, the USS Forrestal.

That same year, a sailor aboard the USS Ranger, another supercarrier, delayed its deployment to the Pacific by three months by allegedly sticking a paint scraper in the main reduction gear, which disabled an engine.

Per an article in the Alameda Post, the Navy's official history of the Ranger confirms that sabotage was becoming more popular as the war in Vietnam became more unpopular.

Sabotage happens every day, all day, a crewman serving aboard another carrier based in Alameda, the Oraskany, was quoted as saying.

Now, these sailors, the folks sabotaging their own warships in the later stages of the Vietnam War, were part of the so-called SOS movement, a protest campaign launched and sustained entirely by sailors angry at being forced to participate in the war against Vietnam.

The movement gained its name from an act of protest in 1971 when 40 sailors stood on the flight deck of their returning aircraft carrier and spelled out SOS with their bodies.

Again, I don't know if sabotage caused the fire on the Gerald Ford, and neither does anyone else, but there are good reasons to believe it did.

As Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in late March, the Ford and its crew have been pushed to the brink after nearly a year at sea.

Normal deployment for sailors on the Ford is like six months.

Come April, it will break the record for the longest post-Vietnam carrier deployment, 294 days.

Crew members have been told their deployment will likely be extended to May, at which point they'll have been at sea for an entire year.

Now, I don't want or really expect anyone to pour out their sympathy for sailors on a warship that has helped to kill a minimum of 1,500 Iranians so far, including 200 children.

But you don't need to feel bad for all the lost birthdays and weddings and missed funerals to understand the deleterious effect that this has on morale.

Fighting spirit isn't just a buzzword.

When soldiers are exhausted and pissed off, they're likelier to fuck things up.

And I'm not just talking about grand acts of sabotage.

When it was still off the coast of Venezuela earlier in this deployment, the Ford suffered massive recurrent issues with its plumbing system, which was ripped off a design used in cruise ships and works very badly.