The Carriers: Why A Second, And Why It’s An Issue
According to Axios, The U.S. is talking about sending more carriers toward Iran.
Right now, only two American carriers are actually on deployment anywhere. The USS Abraham Lincoln is in the Arabian Sea under 5th Fleet, about a few hundred miles off Iran’s coast.
It is actively running drills, and acting as the main platform for roughly ten U.S. warships in the area. Even CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper visited the ship on February 7 with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
The second deployed carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, is in the Caribbean and western Atlantic under 4th Fleet. It was moved from the Mediterranean after Maduro was taken down in Venezuela. Since then it has been focused on counter drug missions, watching regional instability around post Maduro Venezuela, and backing up homeland security. It has been at sea for more than 200 days and is due home to Norfolk, but the deployment has already been stretched once.
In terms of other known carriers, the USS George Washington is based in Japan under 7th Fleet. The USS Theodore Roosevelt on the West Coast and USS George H.W. Bush on the East Coast are both in the middle of workups and big training exercises to certify for spring deployments. They are the first realistic candidates if Trump decides he really wants a second carrier in the region. USS Nimitz and USS Carl Vinson are either coming off deployments and heading toward retirement or starting maintenance periods. Eisenhower, Stennis, Truman and Reagan are deep in yard work or refuelling, and the next Ford class carrier, John F. Kennedy, is still on trials and not yet in the fleet. The lead options for deployment are the Ford, the Washington, and the Bush…And none of those are good options for various reasons.
So on paper the U.S. has eleven carriers. In practice only two are fully out, two are close to deployable, and the rest are tied up for months. Any move to put a second carrier near Iran would mean pulling it out of training or pulling Ford out of the Caribbean and accepting new gaps somewhere else.
Trump is telling interviewers that the indirect talks with Iran in Oman are going “very good.” He says Iran is “much more flexible” after the 2025 twelve day war and the U.S. strikes on nuclear sites. He keeps repeating that Iran “wants to make a deal very badly,” but follows it with a warning. Either there is an agreement that stops nuclear weapons and puts real limits on missiles and proxies, or there will be “something very tough, like last time.” According to the Iranian foreign minister, second round talks with U.S. still have not been scheduled.
Iran insists that missiles, the Axis of Resistance, and wider military questions are not part of the nuclear track. They talk compromise and about technical moves such as diluting 60 percent uranium, but they refuse to fold in rockets or on their proxy groups.
Netanyahu is in Washington. He meets Trump today with updated intelligence that Iran could soon have close to two thousand ballistic missiles again. His goal is to stop any narrow “nuclear only” arrangement. He is pressing for a package that includes missile caps and cuts in Iranian support for proxies. On the ground in Israel, air defense units are on the highest alert they’ve been since the 12-Day war.
Inside Iran, the regime is staging its usual Revolutionary anniversary scenes. Protesters burn U.S. and Israeli flags, hang and burn images of Trump and Netanyahu, and even display mock coffins with the names or faces of American commanders like Brad Cooper…..All this even as Iran is pushing for diplomacy.
Some might say that hanging images of Trump is not the best way to get a pleasant result. But who are we to say…
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