The USS Abraham Lincoln, one of the US’s 11 aircraft carriers, entered Middle Eastern waters this week after an 11-day transit from the South China Sea. Its arrival highlights Donald Trump’s escalating threats to strike Iran for the second time in less than a year.
Accompanying the vessel on Monday were three guided-missile destroyers — part of the “beautiful armada” the US president has ordered towards Iran. It is the largest build-up of US military assets in the region since B-2 bombers dropped 30,000lb bombs on three of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities in June last year.
“This looks like the US is planning to use military force”, both offensively and defensively, said Seth Jones, a former Pentagon and US special operations official. “What is less clear [are] the objectives.”
Trump has used increasingly hostile language towards Tehran, as the US military has expanded its presence in the region following the regime’s lethal crackdown on nationwide protests. On Wednesday he threatened the regime with an attack “far worse” than the June strikes. Time was “running out” for Iran to agree a deal with the US, he said.
The US already has between 30,000 and 40,000 troops in the region, with forces including five air wings — command units comprised of about 70 aircraft — across as many countries and five warships, including two destroyers, along with air defence systems.
On board the Abraham Lincoln is a carrier air wing, with dozens of planes and helicopters, including F-18 and stealth F-35 fighter jets, and EA-18 Growler electronic warfare planes. The aircraft carrier strike group brought to the region about 5,000 additional troops and three destroyers loaded with Tomahawk missiles and air defence munitions.
The US has sent a dozen F-15 fighter jets to the Middle East in recent days, as well as additional THAAD and Patriot air defence systems, according to a US official — defence for US troops and partner forces against any Iranian retaliation. The US has also moved more refuelling and transport aircraft in the region, according to flight tracking data.
The additional assets give Trump a range of options — and is more offensive than defensive, said Dana Stroul, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence for the Middle East.
This recent build-up echoes that which preceded the US bombing raid in June, but is smaller in scale. Last summer, there were two aircraft carrier strike groups in the region.
But Trump could still strike Iran’s air defences and missile programme, including launchers and storage facilities, according to former US national security officials. He could also target high-level regime security officials, the Revolutionary Guards, conventional military forces, command and control centres, and warehouses. The US president could also target Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and potential successors, they added.
Trump has compared any potential action in Iran to the US’s capture this month of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, vowing he could carry out any mission “with speed and violence”.
But former officials warned that Iran would pose a much stiffer test — especially if the US is seeking a change of regime in Tehran. The Islamic regime’s brutal crackdown on demonstrations this month prompted Trump to promise help for the protesters.
“There’s nothing about the Venezuela playbook that could be applied to Iran,” said Stroul. The Iranian regime is “more like a series of rival . . . networks all competing with each other, and the supreme leader sort of manoeuvres and moderates and balances the different power centres”.
Removing Iran’s supreme leader would “not change the nature of this regime” since there is “too much invested across all of these rival power centres”, Stroul added.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that the Iranian regime was “probably weaker than it has ever been”, but acknowledged the complexities that would come with any regime collapse.
“I don’t think anyone can give you a simple answer as to what happens next in Iran,” he told lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
A Maduro-style snatch-and-grab is unlikely, said Mark Cancian, a former Pentagon official. The US does not “have the right forces” in place and has not had enough time to plan. “The geography is much more challenging. Tehran is just further away from the launchpoint than Caracas was.”
He believes that a strike on Iran’s security forces, particularly its elite Revolutionary Guards, would be the most likely.
In any attack by aircraft, F-35s could conduct early strikes since their stealthiness makes them difficult to detect, said Jones. F-18s could be used for precision strikes, while Growlers could conduct electronic warfare and radar jamming. The US could also use cyber attacks to disable Iran’s electricity grid.
Israel, which launched a 12-day war with Iran in June, could carry out strikes in support of an American attack. Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, met Israeli officials in the region over the weekend.
Washington could deploy assets directly from the US or other bases, as it did when it launched the B-2s from Missouri to strike Iran in June.
US aircraft in the region will be able to act defensively, as they did last April when F-15s shot down dozens of Iranian drones attacking Israel.
That could be necessary if Iran retaliated to any US attack — as it has vowed to do. US and Israeli strikes last year degraded Iran’s military capabilities and Tehran has expended much of its arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles.
But the eight permanent bases and 11 other sites the US operates in the Middle East could be vulnerable to retaliation. Centcom’s headquarters at 10,000 US troops at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar would be chief among the targets, as it was during Iran’s short retaliatory attack last year.
There is speculation in Washington and the region that the US could set up a blockade on Iran’s oil exports, as it did with Venezuela. By Monday, the US Navy had moved two destroyers into the “vicinity” of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes.
The US naval forces in place “are capable of disrupting commercial traffic in the Gulf. Not only because those ships are capable of interdiction operations, but also the threat of doing so can have an impact,” said a former defence official.
But a blockade is risky. “In so little space, the window to react to missile, drone, or small boat threats is much smaller, and also raises the risk of miscalculation,” said the former official.
Any US attack “would raise the risk of Iran threatening or actually trying to disrupt flows through the Strait of Hormuz, so it’s not a straightforward decision”, said Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at consultancy Energy Aspects.
Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the strait. It seized a tanker with its crew in December.
Iran has threatened to block other governments in the region from exporting their oil if a blockade is imposed on Tehran. In 2019, Iranian proxies attacked Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure, disabling some exports from the kingdom for weeks. A more sustained attack by Iran or lengthy disruption to oil and gas shipments from the Gulf would risk a sharp rise in global energy prices. A cornered Iran could also try to mine the Strait of Hormuz.
A big question with a blockade is “the amount of resources the administration is willing to put in and then how long it’s willing to sustain it”, said Stroul.
Additional reporting by Abigail Hauslohner in Washington and Malcolm Moore in London
Illustrations by Ian Bott and Bob Haslett, satellite imagery analysis and visualisation by Aditi Bhandari, satellite data monitoring by David Djambazov and cartography by Steven Bernard
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