The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier strike group will leave the eastern Mediterranean Sea, where it was sent just after the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, in the “coming days,” two U.S. officials tell ABC News.
A senior U.S. official and a U.S. official told ABC News that in the “coming days,” the carrier and other surface ships that make up the strike group will return to the carrier’s home port of Norfolk, Virginia, as originally scheduled so it could prepare for future deployments.
There are basically three reasons they would withdraw the CSG:
- They believe the situation is sufficiently stable and withdrawing the CSG will not encourage Iranian backed groups to escalate too much.
- They want to signal to Israel that ground operations need to wind down within days.
- This is part of regular deployment changes and a replacement force will be deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Given the US were running 24/7 surveillance flights over Gaza, 2 is highly unlikely and there would be other signals like the State department sending that signal.
Option 1 is similarly unlikely given the regional escalations.
Which leaves option 3. Which makes tons of sense and shows military doctrines that are similar - Israel is rotating 5 brigades of reserve troops out of Gaza.
My prediction is that Hezbollah will take a day or two with far fewer rocket launches on Israeli civilians, and then around Jan 3 or 4 they will launch a much larger salvo to test the US response. Hamas already jumped on this, launching 20-some rockets. I haven’t seen an explicit Houthi response yet, but the Eisenhower is closer to them than the Ford so I don’t think they’ll pay close attention to this beyond some saber rattling.
There are basically three reasons they would withdraw the CSG
the strike group will return to the carrier’s home port of Norfolk, Virginia, as originally scheduled so it could prepare for future deployments.
They’ve been on deployment since May. It’s answered in your own post.
The article didn’t mention that they had been deployed since May, and I had thought they were deployed directly from Norfolk in October. That makes a ton more sense.
Yeah your article doesn’t specify when they deployed but it does say that it’s returning on schedule.
So we should expect a replacement deployment?
Yes. Usually the carrier begins movement back as another begins movement in. The outgoing carrier will maintain the ability to reach 5th fleet AOR via fighter jet range until the oncoming carrier can do the same. Then the outgoing carrier officially packs up and leaves.
Yep. All these news articles just don’t point that out in a super obvious way. CSG rotation is completely normal and it has been that way since I was in the Navy. It’s fairly traditional for the carriers to meet up one or twice as well.
- There is a reason to raise defense levels of the East coast.
Not saying it’s likely, but within possible reason.
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