The lack of a U.S. presence in the gulf comes as Russia is escalating its actions in the region and began pounding targets in Syria last week with airstrikes. Russian officials say they’re trying to obliterate ISIS, although the U.S. and its allies say they’re instead hitting rebel fighters who oppose Syrian President Bashar Assad, a Russian ally.
Has Obama surrendered the Middle East, and especially, Israel?
Russia remains a wild card in the region — and the absence of an American aircraft carrier is being noticed, said Peter Daly, a retired Navy vice admiral and CEO of the U.S. Naval Institute.
“The most important thing you need a carrier for is for what you don’t know is going to happen next,” Daly told NBC News.
That was especially important during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the Navy often had two carriers operating in the region. The combat planes can fly into war zones and generally act as a show of force to Iran and other nations during tense standoffs.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt — a massive, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier — has had a central role in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria since August 2014, when the U.S.-led coalition started bombing the Islamist extremists.
A Navy official told Washington lawmakers in July that the lack of a carrier was imminent — and could potentially hamstring operations.
“Without that carrier, there will be a detriment to our capability there,” Adm. John Richardson said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, prior to his confirmation in the Navy’s top post.
The USS Harry S. Truman, which is based out of Norfolk, Virginia, is expected to take over in the region, but when?
Sidelining the USS Theodore Roosevelt also shows how Navy leaders are trying to shave off lengthy deployment times, which have not only worn down the ships, but taken a toll on sailors’ morale, the newspaper said.
The Navy has reportedly blamed the lengthy deployments — some more than 10 months — because of past requirements to have two carriers in the Persian Gulf between 2011 and 2013.
Daly said the U.S. still has options for launching its planes thanks to Turkey, Qatar and other coalition nations that have entered the fight to root out ISIS.
“The biggest value to those carriers is that they are huge, and you have the capability to go from one stop to another, and we don’t need a permission slip from another nation when we want to fly planes,” he added.
Just as essentially, the Navy’s fleet needs to be maintained, and the military can only put it off for so long, Daly said.
“You can make exceptions anytime, but if you make it every time, it catches up with you,” Daly added.
Source: NBC News
Obama seems to being trying to insure it catches soon.
Ovoimt has got to be the stupidest man on earth
Pulling the aircraft carrier out due to Budget cuts? Does that mean everyone on the aircraft carrier gets less pay? No. the cost is the same cuz they continue to get paid. Do the pilots get less pay from not flying? No.
We created ISIS/IS/ISIL or whatever they’re calling themselves this week in a vain attempt to hide that we created them. We as in: McCain, Clinton,Kerry, Graham, Obama etc along with with the consent and approval of Congress and at least 1 billion in appropriations borrowed or printed that becomes debt for our great grandchildren. And for what? Assad is Aunt Bee compared to ISIS. I say let the Russians clean up our mess.
Watch this again and try to convince yourself that a class A fire, wood, paper, furniture, plastics can do this to a steel reinforced bldg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk
“Let our answer be this–America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, equal justice, and equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama, the European World, will be contests between inveterate power, and emerging right.
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
Forgotten words from John Quincy Adams.