army nato assignments

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General Officer Assignments

The Chief of Staff of the Army announces the following officer assignments:

Gen. James J. Mingus to vice chief of staff of the Army, Washington, D.C. He most recently served as director, Joint Staff, Washington, D.C.

Lt. Gen. Michele H. Bredenkamp to director's advisor for Military Affairs, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Washington, D.C. She most recently served as commanding general, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

Lt. Gen. Robert M. Collins to military deputy/director, Army Acquisition Corps, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics and Technology), Washington, D.C. He most recently served as deputy for Acquisition and Systems Management, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics and Technology), Washington, D.C.

Lt. Gen. Sean A. Gainey to commanding general, U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/U.S. Army Forces Strategic Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. He most recently served as director, Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office; and director of Fires, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-3/5/7, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.

Lt. Gen. Karl H. Gingrich to deputy chief of staff, G-8, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. He most recently served as director, Program Analysis and Evaluation, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-8, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.

Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Hale to deputy chief of staff, G-2, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. He most recently served as commanding general/commandant, U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence and Fort Huachuca, Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Lt. Gen. William J. Hartman to deputy commander, U.S. Cyber Command, Fort Meade, Maryland. He most recently served as commander, Cyber National Mission Force, U.S. Cyber Command, Fort Meade, Maryland.

Lt. Gen. David M. Hodne to deputy commanding general, Futures and Concepts, U.S. Army Futures Command, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia. He most recently served as director, Chief of Staff of the Army Transition Team, Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army, Washington, D.C.

Lt. Gen. Heidi J. Hoyle to deputy chief of staff, G-4, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. She most recently served as director of Operations, G-43/5/7, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-4, U.S. Army, Washington, DC.

Lt. Gen. David T. Isaacson to director, J-6, Joint Staff, Washington, D.C. He most recently served as director, J-1, Joint Staff, Washington, D.C.

Lt. Gen. Mary K. Izaquirre to The Surgeon General, U.S. Army; and commanding general, U.S. Army Medical Command, Washington, D.C. She most recently served as commanding general, Medical Readiness Command, East; and chief of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

Lt. Gen. Thomas L. James to deputy commander, U.S. Space Command, Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado. He most recently served as deputy commander, Combined Joint Task Force Space Operations, U.S. Space Command, Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado.

Lt. Gen. Laura A. Potter to director of the Army Staff, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. She most recently served as deputy chief of staff, G-2, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.

Lt. Gen. Andrew M. Rohling to deputy chairman, NATO Military Committee, Belgium. He most recently served as deputy commanding general, U.S. Army Europe-Africa, Germany.

Lt. Gen. Mark T. Simerly to director, Defense Logistics Agency, Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He most recently served as commanding general, U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command/Sustainment Center of Excellence and Fort Gregg-Adams, Fort Gregg-Adams, Virginia.

Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Sims II to director, Joint Staff, Washington, D.C. He most recently served as director for Operations, J-3, Joint Staff, Washington, D.C.

Maj. Gen. (Promotable) John W. Brennan Jr. to deputy commander, U.S. Africa Command, Germany. He most recently served as director of operations, J-3, U.S. Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

Maj. Gen. (Promotable) Charles D. Costanza to commanding general, V Corps, Fort Knox, Kentucky. He most recently served as commanding general, 3rd Infantry Division and Fort Stewart, Fort Stewart, Georgia.

Maj. Gen. (Promotable) Stephen G. Smith to deputy commanding general/chief of staff, U.S. Army Forces Command, Fort Liberty, North Carolina. He most recently served as commanding general, 7th Infantry Division, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington.

Maj. Gen. Andrew C. Gainey, commanding general, 56th Artillery Command, U.S. Army Europe-Africa, Germany, to commanding general, Southern European Task Force-Africa; and deputy commanding general for Africa, U.S. Army Europe-Africa, Italy.

Maj. Gen. Gavin J. Gardner, director for Logistics, Engineering and Security Cooperation, J-4, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Camp H. M. Smith, Hawaii, to commanding general, 8th Theater Sustainment Command, Fort Shafter, Hawaii.

Maj. Gen. Patrick L. Gaydon, vice director for Joint Force Development, J-7, Joint Staff, Washington, D.C., to commanding general, U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

Chaplain (Maj. Gen.) William Green Jr. to chief of chaplains, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. He most recently served as deputy chief of chaplains, Office of the Chief of Chaplains, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.

Maj. Gen. Garrick M. Harmon, deputy commanding general, Security Assistance Group-Ukraine, Operation Atlantic Resolve, Germany, to director of Strategy, Plans, and Programs, U.S. Africa Command, Germany.

Maj. Gen. Joseph E. Hilbert, director, Force Development, G-8, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C., to commanding general, 11th Airborne Division; and deputy commander, U.S. Alaskan Command, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska.

Maj. Gen. James P. Isenhower III, commanding general, 1st Armored Division and Fort Bliss, Fort Bliss, Texas, to assistant deputy chief of staff, G-3/5/7, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.

Maj. Gen. Ryan M. Janovic, director of Operations, J-3, U.S. Cyber Command, Fort Meade, Maryland, to commanding general, Cyber Center of Excellence and Fort Eisenhower, Fort Eisenhower, Georgia.

Maj. Gen. Paula C. Lodi, commanding general, 18th Medical Command (Deployment Support); and command surgeon, U.S. Army Pacific, Fort Shafter, Hawaii, to commanding general, U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command and Fort Detrick, Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Maj. Gen. Charles T. Lombardo, director of Training, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-3/5/7, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C., to commanding general, 2nd Infantry Division (Combined), Eighth Army, Republic of Korea.

Maj. Gen. Douglas S. Lowrey, commanding general, Mission and Installation Contracting Command, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, to commanding general, Army Contracting Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.

Maj. Gen. Jacqueline D. McPhail, director of Architecture, Operations, Networks and Space, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-6, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C., to commanding general, U.S. Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Maj. Gen. Scott M. Naumann, deputy chief of staff, G-3/5/7, U.S. Army Forces Command, Fort Liberty, North Carolina, to commanding general, 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) and Fort Drum, Fort Drum, New York.

Maj. Gen. Thomas W. O'Connor Jr., commanding general, U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, to director, Force Development, G-8, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.

Maj. Gen. John L. Rafferty Jr., chief of Public Affairs, Office of the Secretary of the Army, Washington, D.C., to commanding general, 56th Artillery Command, U.S. Army Europe-Africa, Germany.

Maj. Gen. Hope C. Rampy, director, Military Personnel Management, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-1, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C., to commanding general, U.S. Army Human Resources Command, Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Maj. Gen. Jeth B. Rey, director, Network Cross Functional Team, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to director of Architecture, Operations, Networks and Space, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-6, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.

Maj. Gen. Lori L. Robinson, commandant of Cadets, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York, to commanding general, U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.

Maj. Gen. James M. Smith, director of Operations, G-43/5/7, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-4, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C., to deputy commanding general, Installation Management Command, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

Maj. Gen. Curtis D. Taylor, commanding general, National Training Center and Fort Irwin, Fort Irwin, California, to commanding general, 1st Armored Division and Fort Bliss, Fort Bliss, Texas.

Maj. Gen. Colin P. Tuley, deputy commanding general, XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Liberty, North Carolina, to commanding general, U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence and Fort Moore, Fort Moore, Georgia.

Brig. Gen. (Promotable) David W. Gardner, commanding general, Joint Readiness Training Center and Fort Johnson, Fort Johnson, Louisiana, to deputy chief of staff, G-3/5/7, U.S. Army Forces Command, Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

Brig. Gen. (Promotable) Monte L. Rone, commandant, U.S. Army Infantry School, U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence; and director, Future Soldier Lethality Cross Functional Team, Army Futures Command, Fort Moore, Georgia to Commanding General, 1st Infantry Division and Fort Riley, Fort Riley, Kansas.

Brig. Gen. Brandon C. Anderson, deputy commanding general (Support), 2nd Infantry Division (Combined), Eighth Army, Republic of Korea, to commanding general, National Training Center and Fort Irwin, Fort Irwin, California.

Brig. Gen. Amanda L. Azubuike, deputy commanding general, U.S. Army Cadet Command, Fort Knox, New York, to chief of Public Affairs, Office of the Secretary of the Army, Washington, D.C.

Brig. Gen. Maurice O. Barnett, commanding general, 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, Germany, to commanding general, U.S. Army Cadet Command, Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Brig. Gen. Christine A. Beeler, commanding general, Army Contracting Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, to program executive officer, Simulations, Training and Instrumentation, Orlando, Florida.

Brig. Gen. Beth A. Behn, chief of Transportation and commandant, U.S. Army Transportation School, U.S. Army Sustainment Center of Excellence, Fort Gregg-Adams, Virginia, to director of Operations, G-43/5/7, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-4, U.S. Army, Washington, DC.

Brig. Gen. Matthew W. Braman, deputy commanding general (Support), 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), Fort Drum, New York, to director, Army Aviation, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-3/5/7, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.

Brig. Gen. Matthew W. Brown, deputy commanding general, 3rd (United Kingdom) Division, United Kingdom, to deputy commanding general, V Corps, Germany.

Brig. Gen. John P. Cogbill, deputy director, Operations Fires and Effects, J-3, U.S. Central Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida to Deputy Commanding General, XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

Brig. Gen. Eugene D. Cox, commanding general, Medical Readiness Command, West; and director, Defense Health Network West, Defense Health Agency, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, to commanding general, 18th Medical Command (Deployment Support); and command surgeon, U.S. Army Pacific, Fort Shafter, Hawaii.

Brig. Gen. Jason A. Curl, director, CJ3, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, Operation Inherent Resolve, Iraq, to commanding general, Joint Readiness Training Center and Fort Johnson, Fort Johnson, Louisiana.

Brig. Gen. Sean P. Davis, commanding general, 13th Expeditionary Sustainment Command, Fort Cavazos, Texas, and Operation Spartan Shield, Kuwait, to deputy chief of staff, G-4, U.S. Army Forces Command, Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

Brig. Gen. Sara E. Dudley, deputy commanding general, U.S. Army Special Warfare Center and School, Fort Liberty, North Carolina, to deputy commanding general for Operations, U.S. Army Recruiting Command, Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Brig. Gen. Patrick J. Ellis, deputy chief of staff, G-3, U.S. Army Europe-Africa, Germany, to director, Network Cross Functional Team, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

Brig. Gen. Joseph E. Escandon, deputy chief of staff for Operations, Plans and Experiments, G-3/5/7, U.S. Army Futures Command, Austin, Texas, to deputy commanding general (Operations), 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), Fort Drum, New York.

Brig. Gen. Alric L. Francis, deputy commander (Operations), 1st Armored Division, Fort Bliss, Texas, to commandant, U.S. Army Field Artillery School, U.S. Army Fires Center of Excellence, Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Brig. Gen. Kirk E. Gibbs, commanding general, Pacific Ocean Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Shafter, Hawaii, to commanding general, Northwestern Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Portland, Oregon.

Brig. Gen. George C. Hackler, commanding general, U.S. Army Operational Test Command; deputy commanding general for Operational Testing, U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, Fort Cavazos, Texas, to deputy commanding general, Combat Capabilities Development Command; and senior commander, Natick Soldier Systems Center, U.S. Army Futures Command, Natick, Massachusetts.

Brig. Gen. Peter G. Hart, deputy director, Strategy, Plans and Policy, J-5, U.S. Central Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, to deputy director for Joint Strategic Planning, Strategy, Plans, and Policy Directorate, J-5, Joint Staff, Washington, D.C.

Brig. Gen. Paul D. Howard, commandant, U.S. Army Signal School, Fort Eisenhower, Georgia, to director, J-6, U.S. Central Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

Brig. Gen. Paige M. Jennings, commanding general, U.S. Army Financial Management Command, Indianapolis, Indiana, to director, J-1, Joint Staff, Washington, D.C.

Brig. Gen. Gregory S. Johnson, The Adjutant General of the U.S. Army, U.S. Army Human Resources Command; commanding general, U.S. Army Physical Disability Agency; and executive director, Military Postal Service Agency, Fort Knox, Kentucky, to director, Military Personnel Management, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-1, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.

Brig. Gen. Curtis W. King, commandant, U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery School, U.S. Army Fires Center of Excellence, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to commanding general, 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, Germany.

Brig. Gen. Niave F. Knell, deputy commanding general (Support),1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kansas, to deputy commanding general, U.S. Army North, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Lambert, deputy commanding general, V Corps, Germany, to commanding general, Security Force Assistance Command, Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

Brig. Gen. Shannon M. Lucas, deputy provost marshal general, Office of the Provost Marshal General, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C., to commanding general, U.S. Army Operational Test Command; and deputy commanding general for Operational Testing, U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, Fort Cavazos, Texas.

Brig. Gen. Mark D. Miles, director of Command, Control, Communications and Cyber, J-6, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Camp Smith, Hawaii, to deputy commanding general, Cyber Center of Excellence and Fort Eisenhower, Fort Eisenhower, Georgia.

Brig. Gen. Constantin E. Nicolet, director of Intelligence, J-2, U.S. Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, to director, J-2, U.S. Central Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

Brig. Gen. David C. Phillips to program executive officer, Program Executive Office - Aviation, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. He most recently served as project manager, Future Long Range Assault Aircraft, Program Executive Office Aviation, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.

Brig. Gen. Philip J. Ryan, commander, Special Operations Joint Task Force-Levant, Operation Inherent Resolve, Jordan, to commanding general, U.S. Army South, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

Brig. Gen. Andrew O. Saslav, deputy commanding general (Operations), 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Liberty, North Carolina, to deputy chief of staff, G-3, U.S. Army Europe-Africa, Germany.

Brig. Gen. Jason C. Slider, deputy commanding general (Operations), 3rd Division (France), France, to commanding general, U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

Chaplain (Brig. Gen.) Jack J. Stumme to deputy chief of chaplains, Office of the Chief of Chaplains, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. He most recently served as command chaplain, U.S. Army Europe-Africa, Germany.

Brig. Gen. James D. Turinetti IV, director, J-6, U.S. Central Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, to commanding general, U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command and Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

Brig. Gen. Camilla A. White, deputy program executive officer, Command, Control and Communication (Tactical), Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to program executive officer, Combat Support/Combat Service Support, Warren, Michigan.

Brig. Gen. Jeremy S. Wilson, deputy commanding general (Maneuver), 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Georgia, to deputy commanding general-Training, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Brig. Gen. Scott C. Woodward, deputy commanding general-Training, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to deputy commanding general (Support), 2nd Infantry Division (Combined), Eighth Army, Republic of Korea.

Brig. Gen. Joseph W. Wortham II, deputy commanding general (Operations), 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), Fort Liberty, North Carolina, to assistant commander-Support, Joint Special Operations Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

Brig. Gen. David J. Zinn, deputy commanding general (Operations), 25th Infantry Division, Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, to director of Training, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-3/5/7, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.

Col. Andrew L. Landers,* commander, 68th Medical Command (Deployment Support); and command surgeon, U.S. Army Europe-Africa, Germany, to deputy chief of staff for Operations, U.S. Army Medical Command, Falls Church, Virginia.

Col. Yolonda R. Summons,* deputy chief of staff for Operations, U.S. Army Medical Command, Falls Church, Virginia, to commander, Medical Readiness Command, West; and director, Defense Health Network West, Defense Health Agency, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

* Officer has been nominated for promotion to brigadier general. Assignment of this colonel should not be construed as the Senate's consent of this promotion nomination. There will be no action to frock or promote these officers until confirmed by the Senate.

Army Reserve

Maj. Gen. Deborah L. Kotulich, director (Inactive Ready Reserve), Army Recruiting and Retention Task Force, Washington, D.C., to deputy chief of Army Reserve (Individual Mobilized Augmentee), Office of the Chief of Army Reserve, Washington, D.C.

Brig. Gen. Kent J. Lightner, deputy commander - Support (Troop Program Unit), 412th Engineer Command, Vicksburg, Mississippi, to deputy commander - Support (Troop Program Unit), 81st Readiness Division, Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

Brig. Gen. Katherine A. Simonson, deputy commander (Troop Program Unit), 3rd Medical Command, Forest Park, Georgia, to deputy commanding general (Inactive Ready Reserve), U.S. Army Recruiting Command, Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Brig. Gen. Richard W. Corner II, commander (Troop Program Unit), 85th U.S. Army Reserve Support Command, Arlington Heights, Illinois, to special assistant to the assistant secretary of the Army (Individual Mobilized Augmentee), Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army, Washington, D,C.

Brig. Gen. Brian T. Cashman, deputy commanding general (Individual Mobilized Augmentee), Southern European Task Force Africa, Italy, to commander, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, U.S. Africa Command, Djibouti.

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Alliance Assignments: Defense Priorities for Key NATO States

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The shocking brutality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has galvanized allied governments to address long-standing shortcomings in NATO’s defense preparations. After decades of engagement in out-of-area contingency operations, NATO is once again committed to collectively defending “every inch of allied territory and every inch of allied airspace.” The problem is that current allied defense capabilities and posture are not adequate to do so.

At their July Vilnius Summit, NATO leaders endorsed significant improvements in allied military strategy, plans, and posture. They also pledged to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense and to devote 20 percent of their military budgets to the modernization of capabilities. Allies will have an opportunity to review and accelerate these commitments at NATO’s 75th Anniversary Summit in Washington next July. While public support for NATO remains very high on both sides of the Atlantic , growing fatigue in allied countries with providing military assistance to Ukraine, coupled with the rise of populist politicians who are skeptical of NATO, or even sympathetic to Russia , could undermine support for allied defense enhancements. Robust public education efforts, close transatlantic coordination, and, most importantly, continued U.S. leadership will be essential to sustain these endeavors.

Russia has been weakened militarily and economically by its war in Ukraine. But it is expected to reconstitute its ground forces over the next several years . Coupled with its less-scathed air and naval capabilities , this will enable Moscow to continue threatening peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic region. Until then, the next five years provide a window of opportunity to build a defense posture that can counter this threat.

Realizing the more robust deterrence and defense posture NATO allies are seeking will require not only sustained investments over the next five years, but also a number of other steps: developing innovative concepts to defeat aggression, exploiting new technologies, augmenting defense industrial capabilities, and better integrating national efforts. As we argue in a new RAND Corporation report, Inflection Point , each individual NATO member should focus on specific priorities as part of this collective effort. Washington, for its part, can better leverage security cooperation and adapt key NATO mechanisms to achieve greater unity of effort.

Priorities for NATO Members

France, Germany, and the United Kingdom will, along with the United States, continue to occupy centerstage in NATO force planning. Each of these countries has full-spectrum military capabilities and is committed to significant defense improvements. Poland and Romania are playing critical roles as anchors of forward defense in Central and Southeastern Europe. The integration of Finland, and eventually Sweden, into NATO defense plans will bolster security in the Nordic-Baltic region. With the right steps, each of these advantages can be enhanced.

France brings substantial experience in joint operations as well as heavy ground forces, artillery, short- and medium-range air defenses, and advanced combat aviation to a future conflict in Eastern Europe. But it lacks mass and sustainment capabilities. Increased U.S.-French collaboration in electronic warfare, countering massed precision fires, air mobility, and air defenses would bolster France’s contributions and collective defense. The U.S. and French armies and navies have also deepened their cooperation in recent years to improve interoperability to undertake combined, high-end operations . Building on its role as the lead nation of the NATO Battlegroup in Romania , its growing defense cooperation with Bucharest , and its naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean, France could help galvanize the integrated defense of Southeastern Europe.

Germany, after decades of underspending that left the Bundeswehr in a dire state , is embracing Zeitenwende . Chancellor Olaf Scholz is gradually taking steps to strengthen the Bundeswehr and enhance Germany’s wider contributions to collective defense. If Germany realizes the proposed investments in equipment and training, and maintains its enlarged NATO Battlegroup in Lithuania , it could build on its role in NATO’s Multinational Corps Northeast and play an even larger role in defense of Northeastern Europe. Germany could also leverage its position as host nation for NATO’s Joint Support and Enabling Command and Air Command to play a leading role in allied theater enablement and sustainment. By building on the European Sky Shield Initiative as well, it could also help lead the integration of European air defense capabilities.

The United Kingdom retains formidable ground, air, and naval forces, and has committed in recent defense reviews to improving their readiness, sustainability, technological edge, and capacity for high-intensity warfighting. However, available resources may be insufficient to realize all the capabilities planned for development over the next decade. Smaller forces are also likely to be strained to meet the United Kingdom’s ambitions to maintain leadership of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, NATO battlegroup in Estonia, and European Joint Expeditionary Force , while also expanding its military operations in the Indo-Pacific. Focusing on capabilities for defense of the Northern Europe and the North Atlantic would be more strategically advantageous for Britain and allies, even as the United Kingdom seeks to retain the capability to undertake periodic naval deployments to the Indo-Pacific in cooperation with the United States, France, Australia, and other countries.

Poland has emerged as a lynchpin of NATO’s eastern flank defenses . Warsaw’s strategic resolve, rapid mobilization plans, ambitious modernization programs , and increasing readiness levels will make the Polish Armed Forces one of the best equipped and trained in NATO for countering Russia in the next five years. Poland also serves as the main transmission belt for Western security assistance to Ukraine and an important locus of training for Ukrainian forces. Poland could become a training, exercising, interoperability, and logistics hub for the alliance, enabling rapid force rotation and reinforcement of allies throughout the region. Given the deepening military integration between Belarus and Russia , allied plans and exercises in Poland should focus on defending two strategic points. First is the Suwałki gap , a 40-mile stretch of Polish territory between Belarus and Kaliningrad, which serves as a critical corridor to Lithuania and the other Baltic states. Second is the Brest gap , a stretch of open terrain along Poland’s southern border with Belarus close to Warsaw.

With Finland , and eventually Sweden, joining Norway in NATO, the alliance will be able to mount a more robust and coherent defense of the Nordic, Baltic, and Arctic regions, backed by new regional defense plans . This effort will build on longstanding regional defense cooperation among all the Nordic states and with U.S., U.K., and other NATO forces. All three countries, and allied sea lanes, remain under threat from surface ships, aircraft with long-range missiles, and attack submarines in Russia’s Northern and Baltic fleets . Norway is taking steps utilizing their advanced F-35 fighters and P-8 maritime patrol aircraft to address these threats, and Norwegian and Swedish aircraft have jointly conducted operations with U.S. heavy bombers to demonstrate the integration of NATO’s high-end conventional and strategic deterrence capabilities. Continuing these operations with Finland and other allies in the region would demonstrate the ability to hold Russian military assets at risk. Access to Finnish and Swedish airbases and airspace, and the integration of both nations’ maritime domain awareness and sea control capabilities into allied structures, will strengthen NATO’s ability to defend the Baltic Sea region.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have made significant strides in bolstering the capabilities and readiness of their comparatively small armed forces. NATO’s three enhanced forward presence battlegroups, coupled with other deployments and exercises, have also strengthened deterrence and the capacity for reinforcement. However, the Baltics remain highly exposed to direct threats of Russia’s aggression and intimidation, and therefore seek a larger NATO presence. While Germany and Canada have committed to bring their battlegroups in Lithuania and Latvia, respectively, up to brigade strength, more should be done. U.S. and allied security assistance can help fill gaps in Baltic air and missile defense, while also addressing shortcomings in artillery, anti-tank weapons, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems. Innovative operational concepts combined with new technologies could rebuff a Russian attack. For example, employing a multi-domain sensing and targeting grid comprising distributed, networked ground-based and airborne sensors could allow the allies to quickly erect robust sensing zones along the border at times of heightened tensions with Russia.

Romania is emerging as the center of gravity for NATO’s defense posture in Southeastern Europe. Bucharest is making significant strides in its plans for modernizing its armed forces . Allied access to the country’s airfields, bases, and port facilities are essential to projecting power into the Black Sea and supporting Ukraine. The augmented NATO battlegroup in Romania — led by France and supported by deployments of U.S. and Polish units — as well as a rotational U.S. brigade, provide scope for leveraging Romania’s leadership of the NATO Multinational Division Headquarters Southeast and Multinational Brigade South-East to enhance the integration of regional defenses. This effort should be supported by the articulation of a long-term transatlantic strategy for the Black Sea region .

Turkey’s geostrategic importance — coupled with the contributions of its large and capable land, air, and naval forces — have sustained military cooperation with Ankara despite strained political relations with most NATO allies. Following President Erdogan’s reelection to a five-year term in May 2023, Turkey will likely continue to balance relations with Moscow and its allies and be reticent to support more robust NATO military operations to deter further Russian aggression in the Black Sea. However, the Turkish defense industry is a leader in development of low-cost, leading-edge technologies, particularly remotely piloted vehicles that have been sold to Ukraine and Poland. Turkey could become a major supplier of affordable, effective systems to allies in Central and Eastern Europe.

Collective NATO Priorities

Under its new deterrence and defense strategy , NATO stepped up both exercises and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance measures in response to Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s border in 2021. This enabled the alliance to rapidly deploy elements of its Very High Readiness Joint Task Force following the Kremlin’s invasion and increase the number of battlegroups in Eastern Europe from four to eight . Today, 150,000 NATO land forces — together with substantial air , air and missile defense, and maritime forces — are conducting deterrence tasks on the alliance’s eastern flank.

At their July Summit, NATO leaders endorsed the new defense strategy as well as a “ family of plans ” and the command and control arrangements needed to implement it. These include an overarching strategic framework for the entire North Atlantic area , operational plans for each military domain, and three regional defense plans for the North Atlantic and High North, Central Europe, and the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. This strategy aims to shape force structure, readiness requirements, and national defense investments.

NATO leaders also established a new “Allied Reaction Force” and cited progress on the Force Model , whereby allies commit to making 300,000 personnel available to NATO military commanders in 30 days. In addition to their commitments to spending and modernization, allies also pledged continued investments in emerging and disruptive technologies under two new initiatives: the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic and the NATO Innovation Fund.

While these are all positive steps, allies need to enhance plans to ensure readiness and rapid reinforcement of any ally on short notice, improve combat capabilities to conduct large-scale operations, and strengthen enablement of NATO forces. Another top priority should be procuring weapons that can engage hostile forces from standoff ranges including anti-ship cruise missiles, mobile missile launchers, and small killer drones that have been used with great effect in Ukraine. NATO governments have learned from the war in Ukraine that any conflict with Russia will compel them to expend munitions at rates and quantities far beyond what current stocks could support. At Vilnius, they established a new Defence Production Action Plan to accelerate joint procurement, boost production capacity, and enhance interoperability. As part of this effort, they should commit to build robust stocks of anti-armor, anti-personnel, anti-air, and surface-to-air suppression weapons over the next five years.

Finally, lessons that the Ukrainian military is learning in operations against Russian forces should be applied to NATO defense plans and training. The establishment of a NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Center in Poland is already underway. Prioritizing its work would benefit both NATO and Ukraine.

Stephen J. Flanagan is an adjunct senior fellow and Anna M. Dowd is an adjunct international/defense researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

Image: U.S. Army photo by Charles Rosemond .

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U.S. Army NATO: Meeting the challenges of an ever-changing environment

Photo By Troy Darr | Col. Troy V. Alexander, U.S. Army NATO Brigade commander, addresses senior Army... ... read more read more

Photo By Troy Darr | Col. Troy V. Alexander, U.S. Army NATO Brigade commander, addresses senior Army officers and senior national representatives newly assigned to NATO units during the Senior Army Leaders Meeting XXII in Garmisch, Germany. The U.S. Army NATO Brigade hosted the meeting July 24-28 to give leaders from 82 locations in 22 countries the opportunity to meet face-to-face and share knowledge and ideas on NATO operations and how best to support the roughly 800 Soldiers and their families serving within NATO organizations in the United States and 21 NATO member nations in Europe. (U.S. Army Photo by Troy Darr)   see less | View Image Page

GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, BY, GERMANY

Story by troy darr  , u.s. army nato.

GARMISCH, Germany – The primary role of NATO’s military forces is to promote peace and guarantee the territorial integrity, political independence and security of member states. "The alliance is in a state of profound change right now," said Supreme Allied Commander Europe, U.S. Army General Christopher G. Cavoli, during the Senior Army Leaders Meeting XXII in Garmisch, Germany, July 24-28. "For the last 30 years we've been focused on crisis management in out of operations areas. Today we've changed our focus to collective deterrence and defense of the NATO operating area," said Cavoli. The annual meeting followed shortly after the historic NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 12 where NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the approval by alliance members of the most detailed and robust defense plans since the end of the Cold War. During the NATO summit, member states committed “to contribute the necessary forces, capabilities and resources to the full range of NATO operations, missions and activities. This includes meeting requirements for deterrence and defense, providing the forces needed to implement NATO’s defense plans and contribute to NATO crisis management operations.” "The current conflict in Europe has set in motion a foundational transformation of European security that is forcing the NATO alliance to shift away from its political focus back to its military roots," said Andrew A. Michta, George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, a keynote speaker during SALM XXII. One of the cornerstones for the U.S. Army NATO’s ability to adapt to a changing strategic environment is the annual Strategic Army Leader Meeting. U.S. Army NATO supports NATO by continuously changing how the organization’s two battalions and nine companies provide for the roughly 800 Soldiers and their families assigned to NATO force structure organizations in the United States and 21 NATO member nations in Europe. The participants in the meeting were a combination of senior Army officers and senior national representatives assigned to NATO billets, senior Army leaders assigned to U.S. Army Europe units, and program managers from across the theater who provide support to the Soldiers and their families. Col. Troy Alexander, U.S. Army NATO Brigade commander, gave opening remarks to the assembled leaders on the first day of the meeting. “From my perspective what you all do each and every day is just incredible,” said Alexander. “This week is a real opportunity to make sure we know what is going on to our left and right flanks and to have some hard conversations about what we must do to strengthen alliance capabilities, capacity and interoperability.” The meeting kicked off July 24 with a five-hour session to orient senior Army officers newly assigned to NATO billets and give them the opportunity to meet the commanders and command sergeants major from Allied Forces North Battalion and Allied Forces South Battalion. The SALM provides U.S. Senior National Representatives and Senior Army Leaders assigned to NATO units with a forum to receive strategic guidance and create shared situational understanding of the current strategic environment. The meeting further affords USA NATO the opportunity to coordinate and synchronize goals and objectives, operational planning and execution for the coming fiscal year. Finally, the meeting facilitates face-to-face interactions and relationship building with geographically separated Army Senior Leaders, identifying issues, concerns, and opportunities to improve warfighter support to Soldiers and families assigned to NATO organizations. This year SALM XXII featured 23 unique sessions ranging from broad NATO topics to NATO manning strategies, and NATO deployments and operations. “This is one of those huge touchpoints throughout the year where I get to come in and hear my leadership’s priorities within the theater, and I get a better understanding of what the U.S. Army is doing writ large,” said Col. Cheryl Korver, senior national representative at the Rapid Reaction Corps-France in Lille. “I also get the opportunity to hear about what my contemporaries and colleagues throughout the AOR (area of responsibility) are doing, whether it's in other foreign national headquarters or in the support elements. “And lastly, I get a chance to talk about the quality-of-life issues and really get to meet with representatives who can help address the issues I have,” said Korver. “And then on the sidelines I get an opportunity to meet and network with people that will make my job easier.” For Col. Phillip Borders, senior national representative for the NATO Joint Support and Enabling Command in Ulm, Germany, the high point in the SALM was the opportunity to build relationships across the theater. “Our responsibility is really before Article 4 (of the North Atlantic Treaty), setting the theater and the reinforcement by forces,” said Borders. “We must develop those relationships now to ensure deterrence and defense of the alliance and to build those relationships across 31 different countries, soon to be 32.” “For me those relationships are the biggest takeaways to ensure we can actually get to the fight and to win alongside our NATO allies, if necessary,” said Borders. This year’s meeting also included a Spouses Forum, where USA NATO sought to build relationships with geographically separated families. Activities included discussions and one-on-one opportunities with various members of the staff in a flexible and open schedule. The discussions allowed participants to gain knowledge on the variety of capabilities and tools available to them in the field, while building relationships and enjoying recreational activities in Garmisch. The spouse activities culminated in a resilience hike around the picturesque Eibsee, a lake high in the Bavarian Alps. “A cornerstone of resilience is a strong community,” said Lt. Col. Craig Johnson, U.S. Army NATO chaplain. “As we continue to develop spiritual resilience in the USA NATO brigade formation, we want to focus on those who are away from the typical Army communities and challenge ourselves and our service members in ways that develop community support that enables them to thrive as military families in unique NATO assignments.” The mission of U.S. Army NATO is to provide individual Soldier and family training, logistics, human resources, and administrative agent support at USA NATO locations to ensure ready and resilient Soldiers, develop leaders, maintain joint and multinational partnerships, and enhance an evolving alliance. A quote repeated by multiple speakers that captured the quintessence of the attitude pervading the weeklong event was the participants’ united commitment “to defend every inch of allied territory.”

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Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.