US defense secretary orders forces to be ready to deploy as Middle East heats up

The U.S. is further beefing up its military presence in the Middle East, sending in additional troops and putting others on standby while keeping an aircraft carrier on station as the region prepares for more violence.

The moves come after Israeli forces killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon on Friday, in a strike that threatens to plunge the region into a wider war.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Sunday ordered the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its attached destroyers to remain in the region, just a month after rerouting them to the Middle East while they were on a planned deployment to the Pacific. The directive comes days after the USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group left its home port in Virginia for a scheduled cruise, potentially creating a two-carrier presence in the Middle East for the second time since the summer.

The Pentagon also announced that the U.S. will be sending additional “air-support capabilities in the coming days,” and that the USS Wasp Amphibious Ready Group will remain in the eastern Mediterranean. The group includes the amphibious ships USS New York and USS Oak Hill, along with thousands of Marines capable of performing civilian evacuations from Lebanon if necessary. The Wasp, which can launch small boats ashore, is also loaded with Marine-flown F-35B fighter planes, giving military planners an extra aerial punch if needed.

Those ships have been patrolling the Mediterranean since June and have been at sea since April. The Wasp group replaced a similar group of amphibious ships led by the USS Bataan, which had its own deployment to the region extended several times and ended up spending eight months at sea before heading home in March.

Meanwhile, Austin ordered additional U.S. forces to be ready to deploy, “elevating our preparedness to respond to various contingencies,” the Pentagon said.

“We did deploy some additional forces into the region,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “We now have more force capability in the Middle East than we did in April, when Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones. So there is already a very robust military capability to defend ourselves and to help defend Israel if it comes to that.”

In a Sunday statement, the Pentagon said the ships are being backed up by “DoD’s elevated fighter and attack squadron presence, including F-22, F-15E, F-16, and A-10 aircraft.”

The Truman, which is still in the Atlantic, was initially scheduled to relieve Lincoln and allow the carrier to return to operations in the Pacific, though those plans may have changed now if the decision is made to put both carriers in the Middle East.

The merry-go-round of U.S. ships in the region comes at a high cost for the Navy. It also leaves the Indo-Pacific shorthanded as ships are pulled into the Middle East to protect American forces and battle Houthi missiles and drones targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

Elsewhere in the region on Thursday, two American destroyers knocked down several cruise and ballistic missiles launched by Houthi forces at the ships traversing the Red Sea.

U.S. Central Command also announced on Sunday that U.S. airstrikes had killed 37 al Qaeda and ISIS fighters in Syria on Sept. 16 and 24, including several operational leaders.

During the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group’s twice-extended nine-month deployment to the Red Sea, U.S. forces fired over 135 Tomahawk land attack missiles at Houthi targets in Yemen.

The F/A-18 aircraft aboard the Eisenhower also fired 60 air-to-air missiles and 420 air-to-surface weapons during the defense strikes at sea and targets on the ground. The Eisenhower and its escort ships returned to post in Virginia in July, handing off to the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier group, which has continued knocking down drones daily.