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The United States military confirmed Thursday that a third aircraft carrier has arrived in the US Central Command area of responsibility, concentrating an extraordinary level of American naval firepower in the Middle East as ceasefire negotiations with Iran remain unresolved and a US naval blockade of Iranian ports enters its second week.
The USS George H.W. Bush, a Nimitz-class supercarrier, is operating in the Indian Ocean after departing Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, in late March.
Rather than taking the conventional route through the Mediterranean Sea and Suez Canal, the carrier sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, a longer passage that allowed it to bypass the Red Sea and the contested Bab el-Mandeb strait. US Central Command announced the carrier's arrival in a post on X, accompanied by an image of the ship's deck packed with warplanes.
The Bush joins two carriers already operating in the theater. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world's largest aircraft carrier, is sailing in the Red Sea after transiting the Suez Canal earlier this month alongside destroyers USS Mahan and USS Winston S. Churchill.
The USS Abraham Lincoln is operating in the northern Arabian Sea. Each carrier travels with a substantial group of supporting warships, and the three strike groups together represent a significant concentration of US naval power, with roughly 27 Navy vessels, or approximately 41 percent of all American warships actively deployed at sea worldwide, now in the region.
Aircraft carriers of this class routinely deploy with crews of nearly 5,000 sailors and aviators, along with embarked air wings comprising multiple squadrons of strike fighters and support aircraft. The Bush is escorted by Arleigh Burke-class destroyers USS Ross, USS Donald Cook and USS Mason.
The Gerald R. Ford has had one of the most operationally demanding deployments of any American carrier in recent decades.
The ship has been at sea for more than 10 months, a stretch that has taken it from operations in the Caribbean, where US forces conducted strikes on alleged drug-smuggling vessels, interdicted sanctioned tankers and seized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, to the ongoing conflict with Iran.
A laundry fire broke out aboard the ship on March 12, forcing it to seek repairs in Croatia, but the carrier returned to operations and transited back into the Red Sea in time to remain available for US strike planning.
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The three-carrier deployment coincides with an increasingly fraught diplomatic situation. The US formally announced a naval blockade of Iranian ports on April 13. Since the blockade began, Central Command has reported that forces directed 33 commercial vessels to turn around or return to Iranian ports.
A more than two-week ceasefire that had paused the US-Israeli air campaign against Iran, launched in late February, has complicated the military posture, with the truce's expiration and the status of a second round of talks in Islamabad remaining uncertain at the time of the Bush's arrival.
The Bush's deployment to the region, via the longer African route, ensures it enters the theater through the Indian Ocean rather than through waters where Iranian-backed Houthi militants have previously targeted international shipping, providing commanders with greater flexibility as diplomatic and military pressures continue to mount.
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