Thousands more US troops are heading to the Middle East

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of additional U.S. troops are heading to the Middle East as the Trump administration has insisted that progress has been made in talks with Iran and has threatened to escalate the war if a deal is not reached soon.

The aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush deployed Tuesday and is slated to go to the Middle East along with three destroyers, two U.S. officials said. The carrier strike group consists of more than 6,000 sailors.

It comes as thousands of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division also have begun arriving in the Middle East, according to two other U.S. officials, who, like the others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans.

While the majority of those troops are part of a rotation of forces planned before the war, some are among roughly 1,500 paratroopers the Trump administration decided to surge into the region last week.

The Trump administration has not said what those troops will be doing, but the 82nd Airborne is trained to parachute into hostile or contested territory to secure key territory and airfields. A U.S. Navy ship carrying about 2,500 Marines recently arrived in the Middle East, and another 2,500 Marines also are being deployed from California.

The extra forces, on top of tens of thousands of service members already in the region, come as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other administration officials have avoided questions about whether or not the U.S. military will deploy ground troops against Iran.

“You can’t fight and win a war if you tell your adversary what you are willing to do or what you are not willing to do to include boots on the ground,” Hegseth told reporters Tuesday.

He added, “Our adversary right now thinks there are 15 different ways we could come at them with boots on the ground. And guess what? There are.”

But he also said the goal is to reach a deal with Iran through talks because “we don’t want to have to do more militarily than we have to.”

Additional resources are heading in as the war has strained the troops and assets already in the region.

The world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, had a fire in a laundry room on March 12, which forced it to return from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea to undergo repairs at a naval base in Crete.

According to a Navy press release, the fire damaged seven berthing compartments aboard the ship, likely forcing hundreds of sailors to find new sleeping arrangements, and damaged personal effects.

While Ford is now in Croatia for time off, Navy leaders said the aircraft carrier will likely set records for the length of its deployment. The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier also arrived in the region in January.

“You’re going to see a recordbreaking deployment by Ford,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, the Navy’s top officer, said during a Center for Strategic and International Studies discussion Tuesday.

Caudle said the aircraft carrier would probably go into the 11th month of deployed operations — a length of time that would put the ship returning to Norfolk, Virginia, around the end of May. The Ford was in the Mediterranean before being sent to the Caribbean to take part in the military operation in January that ousted Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, and then was deployed to support the Iran war.

“For those that are not in the Navy, that’s an extraordinary thing to even think about something of that kind of deployment length,” Caudle said.