This story has taken more than year to land but its based on a 20 year analysis of carrier deployment and maintenance data we built by hand @USNINews. https://twitter.com/USNINews/status/1326933748861054976

20 years ago, a Pentagon initiative pushed the Navy from a predictable deployment schedule to surge carriers at the demand of the combatant commander.

The new deployment scheme, the Fleet Response Plan, began around the start of the Iraqi invasion in 2003 -- just as the demand for carriers in U.S. Central Command got started.

The carrier strike group was structured around being deployed at a steady rate of about 25 percent of the time. Those percentages vacillate in the last twenty years as every year the Navy and the combatant commanders fight over how to use the forces. Check this graf.

That unpredictability of the deployment schedule has played havoc with maintenance schedules and laid bare some of the problems on the East and West coasts.
Check this graf.

Then CENTCOM Co. Jim Mattis insisted on two carriers in the Middle East in the early 2010s that ended with sequestration when the Navy clawed that extra strike group back.

When he was SECDEF, Mattis began protecting strike groups (the numbers say) as the U.S. implemented the new National Security strategy kicked in.
For two years, the carrier strike group was beginning to start the long process of resetting.

That was upended last year when CENTCOM successfully argued for almost a near-permanent pressence in the Middle East since Lincoln was rushed to the region in May 2019. https://news.usni.org/2019/12/16/carrier-uss-abraham-lincoln-leaves-middle-east-after-220-days-truman-in-red-sea

With two months left in the year, there have been more than 855 days underway for carrier groups -- dwarfing the totals for the last five years.
Here's a graf:

As a percentage of the force it's the most that have been underway since the invasion of Iraq.

ALL TOLD: The burning of carrier readiness is not a new problem and inside the service. In fact, it's a very well-understood one.
What's unclear is how effectively the Navy will address the problem going forward as it builds to a fleet in the future.

-FIN-