WASHINGTON: The Pentagon’s unusual move to keep two Navy aircraft operators in the Middle East over the past many months has now finished, as the USS Theodore Roosevelt is heading home, according to US authorities.
The Roosevelt was told by US defence secretary Lloyd Austin to expand its implementation for a short while and stay in the area as the USS Abraham Lincoln was pressured to arrive there more quickly. To protect US soldiers from potential attacks by Iran and its proxies, the Biden presidency increased the US military presence there.
US leaders in the Middle East have long argued that the presence of a US plane ship and the ships that accompany it have been successful deterrents in the region, especially for Iran. Since the Israel-Hamas conflict broke out in the Gaza Strip next fall, there has been constant aircraft presence in and around the area, and for short times there have been overlaps between two of the companies.
Due to past drop, however, it had been years since the US had committed that little ship electricity to the area.
The decision to bring the Roosevelt house comes as the conflict in Gaza has raged on for 11 weeks, with the death of tens of thousands of people, and international efforts to resolve a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas militant party have repeatedly failed because they accuse one another of making more and intolerable demands.
In the Red Sea, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower stayed for a few months earlier this year, assisting both Israel and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in defending commercial and military ships from Houthi attacks. The carrier, based in Norfolk, Virginia, returned home after an over eight-month deployment in combat that the Navy said was the most intense since World War II.
US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss troop movements, said the San Diego-based Roosevelt and the USS Daniel Inouye, a destroyer, are expected to be in the Indo-Pacific Command’s region on Thursday. The USS Russell, the other destroyer in the strike group, has been operating in the South China Sea ever since it left the Middle East.
The Lincoln, which is currently in the Gulf of Oman along with a number of other warships, arrived in the Middle East about three weeks ago, allowing it to overlap with the Roosevelt so far.
Additionally, two destroyers and the guided missile submarine USS Georgia are located in the Red Sea, along with a number of US ships in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
