US Sending Aircraft Carrier, Fighter Jet Squadron To ‘Defend Israel’

The US is sending more warships and additional fighter jets to the Middle East as part of a deployment that’s “entirely focused on defending Israel,” a White House official said Sunday.

The Pentagon announced Friday that it’s sending the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group to replace the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which has been operating in the Middle East. The US is also sending additional US Navy cruisers and destroyers and bolstering its land-based missile defense systems in the region.

A Pentagon official told Air & Space Forces Magazine that a US Air Force squadron of F-22 Raptor fighters jets is also headed to the region.

The US and Israel are expecting a major attack from Iran and its allies in response to the Israeli killing of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran and a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut.

White House Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer claimed the purpose of the new military deployments was to reduce tensions in the region even though US military support has only emboldened Israel to escalate.

“The overall goal is to turn the temperature down in the region, deter and defend against those attacks and avoid regional conflict, which has been our goal really since October 7,” Finer told CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

While the Biden administration has claimed its goal has been to avoid a regional war, reports as far back as November 2023 said that the US believed Israel was trying to provoke a major conflict, and the US continued supplying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with weapons and political support.

The US pledge to defend Israel also makes it more likely that US assets in the region could be targeted in any reprisal attacks. Iran’s allies in Iraq and Syria could target US bases as a way to distract the US from any Iranian missiles fired toward Israel, or the Houthis in Yemen could ramp up attacks on US warships.