The Highway Is the Doctrine
By mid-August 2026, USS Abraham Lincoln had spent close to nine months at sea, more than 200 days of it without unrestricted liberty for the roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard. The New York Times reported deteriorating mental health conditions and hygiene problems serious enough that several crew members had reportedly attempted to jump from the ship; US Central Command denied the specifics on social media, and the President dismissed the concerns outright. Whatever the truth of the individual reports, the underlying cause is not in dispute, because the Navy's own senator-level oversight has said so on the record. Senator Blumenthal put it plainly: the Lincoln's extended deployment raises the question of whether the Navy can sustainably generate carrier forces at all while preserving crew welfare, maintenance schedules, fleet readiness, and the capacity to respond to whatever comes next.
Iran did not sink a carrier. Iran did not shoot down a carrier aircraft in meaningful numbers. What actually happened is smaller, cheaper, and more instructive than either.
What Actually Broke
Early in the war, Iranian drones and missiles struck Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the logistics hub the US Navy had relied on in the Gulf for decades. The base was heavily damaged. The Navy's fallback was Diego Garcia — a British-controlled island roughly 2,200 miles from the carrier strike groups it now had to sustain. A short, established supply line became a long, improvised one overnight.
Diego Garcia did not turn out to be safe either. On March 20th, Iran launched two Khorramshahr-4 medium-range ballistic missiles at the island. One fell short. A US warship intercepted the other. The backup hub survived — this time — but the message was unambiguous: there is no distance that removes a fixed, known, high-value node from an adversary's target list once that adversary has the range and the willingness to try.
None of this required Iran to win a naval engagement, penetrate a carrier's defensive screen, or match American platform quality in any respect. It required identifying the two or three physical locations the entire deployment actually depended on, and having enough missiles and drones to keep hitting them. The Pentagon's own response confirms the arithmetic: it is reportedly racing to buy ten times its normal missile procurement, with officials explicitly worried the Iran war has drawn down interceptor stocks needed for readiness against China. A war against a motivated regional power with a fraction of a peer competitor's capability has already strained American interceptor inventory to the point of emergency procurement. That is the actual lesson, and it has nothing to do with carriers specifically.
The Argument I Almost Made, and Why It Was Wrong
The easy version of this essay writes itself: carriers are expensive, vulnerable, obsolete relics of an expeditionary, power-projecting mindset Europe should abandon in favor of the territorial defence model Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have practiced for decades. ReArm Europe's investment in carrier strike groups and deployable force projection — the Charles de Gaulle, the Prince of Wales, the Cavour — replicates the American vulnerability at smaller scale with less redundancy, and Europe should build inward instead.
That version is wrong, or at least incomplete, and it's worth walking through why, because the correction is the actual argument.
Push on "what is a carrier actually for" and the honest answer splits the mission into pieces that don't fail the same way. Sustained air presence over open water beyond a land-based aircraft's fuel-limited combat radius, and an integrated anti-submarine screen protecting a task group or a shipping lane — these sound like carrier-exclusive capabilities. They mostly aren't. Air-to-air refuelling gives land-based fighters most of that persistence over the Mediterranean or North Atlantic approaches without putting a single hull at risk. NATO's actual Atlantic anti-submarine posture has run for decades on land-based maritime patrol aircraft working with destroyer- and frigate-embarked helicopters, not on a carrier air wing at the centre of the formation. Push harder still — what about survivability, doesn't a carrier's mobility make it a harder target than a fixed base — and the answer is: harder, not hard. A carrier group has a large radar and thermal signature, and an adversary that has spent two decades building long-range anti-ship ballistic missiles specifically to solve the carrier-targeting problem is not meaningfully deterred by the fact that the target moves. Diego Garcia moved nowhere and got hit anyway; a carrier that can be tracked doesn't need to sit still to end up on the same list.
What survives this pressure test is a residual case, and it's smaller than the case usually made for carriers: distant operations with no friendly tanker or basing infrastructure nearby at all — evacuating nationals, protecting a chokepoint far from any allied coastline. Real, but narrow, increasingly vulnerable to any regional actor with cheap drone or missile capability, and — worth naming honestly — closer to the classic power-projection mission profile than to anything resembling territorial defence.
The mistake in the easy version wasn't the conclusion. It was the frame. The Lincoln's deployment wasn't broken by the fact that it involved a carrier. It was broken by concentration — the entire operation depending on a short list of fixed, known physical locations that an adversary only had to find once. A carrier is one especially expensive and trackable instance of that problem. It is not the only instance, and fixing the instance without fixing the underlying vulnerability solves nothing.
The Alternative Already Running on Finnish Roads
Finland has been landing fighter aircraft on ordinary public highways since before most of today's pilots were born, and the origin of the practice is worth being precise about, because the honest version is more useful than the flattering one.
It did not begin as foresight about missiles or drones. It began in the Winter War of 1939–40, when Soviet raids targeted Finnish airfields in the opening days of the invasion and destroyed aircraft on the ground before they could be used. Finland, a small country with a fraction of the resources of its neighbour, dispersed its small air fleet in response, out of necessity rather than doctrine. The habit stuck, and Finnish road planning has incorporated straight, reinforced highway sections designed for wartime conversion into runways ever since.
That history matters for what it isn't: it isn't evidence Finland anticipated the drone age eight decades early. It's evidence that "the enemy destroys your air power on the ground on day one" is not a new problem invented by cheap drones — it's a recurring structural vulnerability that resurfaces with each new generation of strike technology, and Finland built a permanent institutional answer to the category rather than to any one era's specific weapon. That is a different and more durable kind of correctness than tactical genius, and it is the reason the doctrine has turned out to fit 2026 as well as it fit 1940.
The recent record of that doctrine in practice, tested against real fifth-generation aircraft rather than left as theory: Norwegian F-35s first participated in Finland's annual Baana dispersed-operations exercise in 2023. American F-35As from the 495th Fighter Squadron landed on the Hosio highway strip near Ranua in 2024, the first US fighter to do so. Dutch F-35As joined in 2025. In May 2026, Italian F-35Bs — the short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing variant, chosen specifically because it suits a converted road surface — conducted the first-ever F-35B highway operations at the Jokioinen strip on Highway 2, alongside Finnish F/A-18s, in an exercise NATO now formally designates Imminent Field. The following month, at Ramstein Flag 2026, US Marine Corps F-35Bs landed on a Finnish highway for the first time, alongside Polish F-16s and Spanish EF-18s operating from Finnish runways for the first time in their own right — proof the concept isn't tied to one air force or one aircraft type.
NATO's own framing of the exercise series states the logic explicitly: Russia fields long-range ballistic and cruise missiles and one-way attack drones designed to suppress air bases early in a conflict, and the alliance's answer is to disperse combat aircraft and reduce predictable basing patterns before an adversary can strike. Switzerland has run equivalent drills on its own motorways. France's Pégase exercises rapidly redeploy Rafales across multiple locations. The war in Ukraine has independently confirmed the underlying logic outside any exercise context — Russian strikes on Ukrainian airbases far from the front line demonstrated exactly the vulnerability dispersal is built to defeat.
The mechanism is arithmetic, the same arithmetic that broke the Lincoln's supply chain, just run in the opposite direction. Destroying one carrier mission-kills its entire embarked air wing in a single strike. Destroying one highway strip costs an adversary a missile and inconveniences nobody, because the aircraft that would have been there are already dispersed across dozens of other interchangeable, low-signature locations that cost almost nothing to designate and next to nothing to strike from. A concentrated asset, however capable, presents a finite target list. A dispersed one presents an adversary with a targeting problem that doesn't scale — there is no missile inventory large enough to cover every straight kilometre of reinforced road in a country that built its infrastructure around exactly this contingency.
What This Means for Force Composition
The design variable that actually matters is not expeditionary versus territorial, and it is not carrier versus land base. It is concentration versus dispersal, and it cuts across every category of platform Europe is currently investing in.
A fixed airbase and a carrier task group share a vulnerability that has nothing to do with whether either one can also project power abroad: both put the majority of a nation's combat capability at a small number of locations an adversary needs to find only once. Dispersal solves this regardless of what's being dispersed — aircraft on road strips, air defence batteries moved rather than emplaced, logistics nodes multiplied and made redundant rather than concentrated at the single most efficient port. None of this requires abandoning capability. It requires designing the capability so that destroying any single piece of it costs the adversary far more than it costs you to lose that piece.
ReArm Europe's current investment mix — concentrated carrier strike groups, high-value deployable force-projection infrastructure, ports and airports built for efficiency rather than redundancy — optimises for the wrong variable if the actual threat environment is the one the Lincoln's deployment just demonstrated. This is the same distortion the NATO GDP metric encodes: heavy conventional platforms in dedicated defence budgets score well, and smart distributed systems score poorly, so the accounting rewards exactly the concentration the threat environment punishes. The fix isn't necessarily less of any particular platform. It's a different design principle applied to whatever platforms get bought: can this capability survive the loss of any single node it depends on, or does it, like Bahrain and almost like Diego Garcia, represent one strike away from a nine-month crisis that has nothing to do with combat losses at all.
Finland didn't answer that question by reasoning about it in the abstract. It answered it by building roads that double as runways, eight decades before anyone needed them to, for a reason that had nothing to do with the threat that eventually arrived and everything to do with correctly identifying the shape of the problem that keeps coming back. That is the model worth exporting across the continent — not a renunciation of capability, but the same design discipline applied everywhere concentration currently masquerades as strength.
JP Ahonen is a transformation director, Finnish defence reservist, and independent analyst based in Porto Rafti, Greece.