With the United States and Israel expecting a military response any minute now from Iran or its proxies for the recent deaths of Hamas’s political leader and Hezbollah’s second-in-command, the most visible presence of the U.S. military in the region is its hulking aircraft carriers.
With the United States and Israel expecting a military response any minute now from Iran or its proxies for the recent deaths of Hamas’s political leader and Hezbollah’s second-in-command, the most visible presence of the U.S. military in the region is its hulking aircraft carriers.
On Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that he had ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group to accelerate its deployment to the Middle East, leaving the Indo-Pacific empty of carriers. The Lincoln, a ship with a length of nearly 1,100 feet, was accompanied by two squadrons of carrier-launched fighter jets, a guided missile cruiser, and a guided missile destroyer. The United States also sent an additional missile submarine to the region on Sunday night, according to a Pentagon statement.
The Lincoln will join another carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which is already stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean, with its carrier air wing detached on land. It’s the second time in six months that the United States has had two carriers in the region, after sending the USS Gerald Ford and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower back in October. The Eisenhower only just wrapped up its extended deployment in the Middle East.
“Two carriers is definitely a signal,” said Jerry Hendrix, a retired U.S. Navy captain and a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute, a U.S.-based think tank. “It allows us to cover both sides of the Middle East. You’ve got one coming out of the Mediterranean—that gives you double coverage to be able to cover down on Israel on one side and lay pressure on Iran on the other side.”
Even as military experts have cast doubt on the carriers’ ability to hold up against Chinese missiles in the Indo-Pacific, which are designed specifically to kill the massive floating airfields, these latest deployments show that carriers continue to be the workhorse of the U.S. Navy when it comes to showing its presence around the world.
If the White House and Pentagon made the decision to put both aircraft carriers on one side of the Middle East—either in Israel’s Mediterranean backyard or in the Persian Gulf—it would enable the U.S. Navy to have nearly 20 hours a day of continued flight operations from carriers, Hendrix said. And Iran has limited ability to destroy a ship of that size, as it takes a pretty big explosive to kill an aircraft carrier.
“Iran can launch a bunch of weapons at a carrier,” but the ship and its escorts could probably shoot those down, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
The reason that carriers—already one of the biggest parts of the Navy’s budget because of their size and complexity—are getting so much work during the current Middle East crisis is because they’re so readily deployable, as long as they’re already afloat.
“Carriers are often the responsive option,” said Becca Wasser, a senior fellow for the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank. “There’s a continued trend of seeing carriers deployed to the Middle East for these deterrence and reassurance missions.”
Wasser said that aircraft carriers have a “renewed importance,” particularly for the Pentagon’s seven-month-old mission to defend Red Sea shipping against strikes from Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have been attacking the channel and diverting sea trade around the Horn of Africa.
It’s not a new phenomenon, either. Before the Pentagon withdrew the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, Austin ordered the USS Ronald Reagan, which typically performs summer patrols in the Western Pacific, to instead provide more firepower to cover the withdrawal—a move that raised eyebrows among Indo-Pacific hands in Washington.
Though Iran has so far held off from a retaliatory strike against Israel in response to the recent assassinations, it’s not clear that the mere presence of more U.S. assets will deter Tehran. “It’s hard to measure whether all of these deployments have the requisite deterrent effect,” Wasser added.
But even if it doesn’t have a deterrent effect on the Iranians, the carrier has been a major part of air defense efforts in the region in the past several months, said Clark.
“F-18s launching off the carrier go out, and they shoot down these drones and missiles well before they get to the ships,” he said. “Because if it’s a slow-moving drone and you’re a fast-moving jet, you just fly up to it and shoot it.” And if the F-18s can’t get there, the U.S. Marines have EA-18G Growlers, a specialized version of the Super Hornet that can jam Iranian drones and missiles.
But the work rate is taking its toll. The USS Roosevelt is soon supposed to go home and into maintenance. The USS Truman is only just coming out of maintenance, and won’t show up for another three to four months. The USS Nimitz and USS Eisenhower are in pre-decommission cycles, and when they are taken out of service, it will cut the number of active U.S. aircraft carriers from 11 to nine. The USS Stennis is in the second phase of its midlife overhaul, which includes a fresh coat of paint as well as refurbished propellers and rudders. And the USS Washington is heading to the Pacific, but it’s supposed to go back into the shop at the beginning of 2025.
“It’s kind of unsustainable,” Clark said. “There may not be a carrier available to go to the Pacific because it may have to go to the Middle East, because there’s no more carriers on the East Coast.”
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