During the 2012 presidential debates, Gov. Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama for depleting the military budget and reducing the U.S. Navy to the fewest ships since 1917. “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed,” Obama responded, alleging that the function of traditional warships had been rendered obsolete in the era of aircraft carriers and submarines.
The U.S. Navy’s current deployment in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea has proven Obama wrong. The timely surface engagements and swift operations carried out by ships in carrier strike groups — the very destroyers, amphibious ships, and cruisers that Romney vouched for — have played a significant role in combating Houthis attacks and supporting Israel against Hamas and the Iranian terrorist group Hezbollah. The presence and abundance of U.S. sea power may even act as the sole deterrent to a full-scale regional war.
The arrival on June 28 of the Wasp Amphibious Ready Group to the Eastern Mediterranean came in response to escalating tensions and verbal assaults between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel has been engaged in a relatively restrained yet gradually escalating aerial war with the terrorist group on the Lebanese border since Oct. 8. Recent verbal escalation, however, has both sides warning of ground invasions and boasting secret weapons and capabilities.
The amphibious group arrived off the coast of Lebanon as a “deterrence,” according to an anonymous U.S. official. Onboard the flagship USS Wasp are F-35 fighter jets, rotary aircraft, and roughly 2,000 marines from the 24th Expeditionary Unit. She is accompanied by the landing ship USS Oak Hill and the transport docking ship USS New York, all able to support landing craft and evacuate civilians.
The Wasp squadron is joined in the Eastern Mediterranean by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group and the HMS Duncan. The flotilla follows in the wake of the recently departed Gerald Ford Carrier Strike Group that arrived on the scene after Oct. 7 and the Bataan Amphibious Ready Group deployed in the region since January.
With the Ford Carrier Group now back in Norfolk, Virginia, the guided missile destroyer USS Carney was awarded an Israel Defense Force (IDF) certificate of appreciation by IDF Major General Amir Baram. While meeting senior officials at the Pentagon, Baram praised the Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, for downing dozens of drones and missiles fired from Iranian soil toward Israel on April 14.
The bolstered U.S. naval strength in the Eastern Mediterranean follows the release of a Hezbollah drone surveillance video of Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city. The video ignited a string of verbal threats between Israeli officials and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Home to Israel’s major seaport and naval base, Haifa lies only 25 miles south of the Lebanese border. “No place” in Israel “is safe from our missiles,” Nasrallah warned in a speech celebrating his surveillance footage, “and it won’t be arbitrary. Everything will be deliberately targeted.”
The 9-minute video showed residential suburbs, military complexes, Iron Dome batteries, missile silos, radar sites, oil depots, and military and commercial ships moored in Haifa harbor. According to Boaz Shapira of the Alma Research Foundation, “there is no certainty that the video was filmed during a single sortie,” or even that it was current. Considered by most Israeli officials as a mere psychological terror tactic, the surveillance footage nonetheless prompted Israel Foreign Minister Israel Katz to warn of an “all-out war.”
Iran, however, cannot afford to see Hezbollah, its most powerful military proxy in the Middle East, defeated by Israel in a ground war. If Israel initiates “a full-scale military attack,” the Iranian delegation to the UN warned, “a war of annihilation will begin. All options, including the full involvement of all resistance fronts, are on the table.” Coordination began at the end of June between senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials and three Shia militia groups in Iraq (Hezbollah Brigades in Iraq, Al-Anjaba Movement, and Katayib Sayyid al-Shuhda’a) that expressed willingness to enter Lebanon in support of Hezbollah should the war escalate.
The day following the drone footage release, the potential war’s regional scope widened considerably as Nasrallah accused Cyprus, 125 miles off the coast of Lebanon, of providing airstrips to IDF fighter jets. The Hezbollah leader warned that the sovereign European Union nation would not be spared if full-scale war erupted. Greek Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis called Nasrallah’s threat “absolutely unacceptable” and expressed Greece’s commitment to “stand by Cyprus… in all kinds of global threats coming from terrorist organizations.”
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides asserted that his country is in “no way involved in the war conflicts,” and is, in fact, part of the solution. Cyprus allowed the World Central Kitchen and United Arab Emirates to use the city of Larnaca as the departure port for humanitarian aid to Gaza. The Cyprus humanitarian corridor “is recognized not only by the Arab world but by the international community as a whole,” Christodoulides maintained.
Many European countries in recent days have joined the White House and the Kremlin in advising its citizens to leave Lebanon and prepare for evacuation. Swiss Airlines and the German airlines Lufthansa and Eurowings have also canceled or made alterations to flights to Beirut starting June 29.
Although Hezbollah certainly presents a more formidable foe to Israel than Hamas in Gaza, the IDF and the Israeli War Cabinet have approved operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon, evident on the ground by troop and supply movements headed north. The IDF equally boasts full preparedness and undisclosed “destructive weapons.”
“We of course possess infinitely more powerful capabilities, which I think the enemy [Hezbollah] knows only a little about, and it will meet them when necessary at the right time,” IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzl Halevi stated during a June 19 speech to Israeli troops on the northern border. Although widely recognized as the only nuclear state in the Middle East, Israel maintains strategic nuclear ambiguity and Halevi was referencing capabilities solely within the IDF’s conventional arsenal.
Even in today’s technologically advanced and nuclear age, the weight of traditional U.S. naval power still sends a clear message to the world. The arrival of the Wasp Amphibious Ready Group points not only to impending escalation in the Middle East but the necessity of a resilient U.S. Navy to deter global conflict.
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