US sending aircraft carrier to protect Israel

The US decision to redirect the USS Abraham Lincoln to the Middle East away from Asia leaves the West Pacific dangerously open until a newly refurbished aircraft carrier arrives in Japan later this year, according to Nikkei Asia. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, operating near Guam, to head to the Middle East to replace the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

This move came less than two months after Austin directed the Roosevelt, which also had been on a Pacific deployment, to replace the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group in the Red Sea. The Roosevelt will return to the US, and the Eisenhower already has done so.

The Lincoln and the Roosevelt had been stationed in the Asia-Pacific to cover for the short-term absence of a Japan-based carrier.

Bryan McGrath, a retired surface warship officer and founding managing director of consultancy The FerryBridge Group, said the U.S. Navy's absence in the region reinforces to Chinese President Xi Jinping "the fact that the United States of America does not have enough naval power to cover its requirements."

Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore, said the Pentagon has concluded that "the situation in the Western Pacific is at least stabilizing for now."

Koh said this is based on South China Sea tensions winding down since China and the Philippines agreed to a provisional arrangement, and with Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula "while still tense, at least under control."

But if a full-scale armed conflict does break out in Asia, "US military power projection capabilities in the Western Pacific are expected to suffer from the absence of a carrier strike group," he said. "Land-based assets are useful, but they do lack the versatility offered by naval forces, and US Navy carrier strike groups constitute the linchpin of such assets."

The shift in military posture is intended to "increase support for the defense of Israel," deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a statement on Monday. Iran has vowed to retaliate after Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh was killed last week in Tehran.

Plans shared by the US Navy to Nikkei Asia confirmed that a "carrier gap" in the West Pacific was emerging. The USS Carl Vinson, which was assumed by security observers to move westward after being in Hawaii for the biennial Rim of the Pacific exercise, instead will head directly back to San Diego, a spokesperson said on Monday.

The next carrier to be deployed to the West Pacific will be the USS George Washington, when it arrives in Yokosuka, Japan, to be the forward-deployed carrier replacing the USS Ronald Reagan, the spokesperson said. The navy has previously said the George Washington is expected to arrive in the autumn.