America’s Middle East Defense Rests on Aircraft Carriers

With the United States and Israel expecting a military response any minute now from Iran or its proxies for the recent deaths of Hamas’s political leader and Hezbollah’s second-in-command, the most visible presence of the U.S. military in the region is its hulking aircraft carriers.

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The reason that carriers—already one of the biggest parts of the Navy’s budget because of their size and complexity—are getting so much work during the current Middle East crisis is because they’re so readily deployable, as long as they’re already afloat.

“Carriers are often the responsive option,” said Becca Wasser, a senior fellow for the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank. “There’s a continued trend of seeing carriers deployed to the Middle East for these deterrence and reassurance missions.”

Wasser said that aircraft carriers have a “renewed importance,” particularly for the Pentagon’s seven-month-old mission to defend Red Sea shipping against strikes from Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have been attacking the channel and diverting sea trade around the Horn of Africa.

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