The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, is being sent from the Caribbean Sea to the Mideast to join other warships and military assets the US has built up in the region.
President Donald Trump said Friday that he decided to move a second aircraft carrier into the Middle East as he presses Iran to make a deal over its nuclear program.
The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, is being sent from the Caribbean Sea to the Mideast to join other warships and military assets the US has built up in the region. The planned deployment comes just days after Trump suggested another round of talks with the Iranians was at hand. Those negotiations didn’t materialize as one of Tehran’s top security officials visited Oman and Qatar this week and exchanged messages with US intermediaries.
“In case we don’t make a deal, we’ll need it,” Trump told reporters about the second carrier. He added, “It’ll be leaving very soon.”
Already, Gulf Arab nations have warned any attack could spiral into another regional conflict in a Mideast still reeling from the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Iranians are beginning to hold 40-day mourning ceremonies for the thousands killed in Tehran’s bloody crackdown on nationwide protests last month, adding to the internal pressure faced by the sanctions-battered Islamic Republic.
The Ford, whose new deployment was first reported by The New York Times, will join the USS Abraham Lincoln and its accompanying guided-missile destroyers, which have been in the region for over two weeks. US forces already have shot down an Iranian drone that approached the Lincoln on the same day last week that Iran tried to stop a US-flagged ship in the Strait of Hormuz.
It is a quick turnaround for the Ford, which Trump sent from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean last October as the administration built up a huge military presence in the lead-up to the surprise raid last month that captured then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
It also appears to be at odds with the Trump administration’s national security and defense strategies, which put an emphasis on the Western Hemisphere over other parts of the world.
In response to questions about the movement of the Ford, U.S. Southern Command said U.S. forces in Latin America will continue to “counter illicit activities and malign actors in the Western Hemisphere.”
“While force posture evolves, our operational capability does not,” Col. Emanuel Ortiz, spokesperson for Southern Command, said in a statement. U.S. “forces remain fully ready to project power, defend themselves, and protect U.S. interests in the region.”
The Ford strike group will bring more than 5,000 additional troops to the Middle East but few capabilities or weapons that don’t already exist within the Lincoln group. Having two carriers will double the number of aircraft and munitions that are available to military planners and Trump.
Given the Ford’s current position in the Caribbean, it will likely be weeks before it is off the coast of Iran.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to use force to compel Iran to agree to constrain its nuclear program and earlier over Tehran’s bloody crackdown on nationwide protests.
Iran and the United States held indirect talks in Oman a week ago, and Trump later warned Tehran that failure to reach an agreement with his administration would be “very traumatic.” Similar talks last year ultimately broke down in June as Israel launched what became a 12-day war on Iran that included the U.S. bombing Iranian nuclear sites.
Asked by a reporter about the new negotiations, Trump said Friday that “I think they’ll be successful. And if they’re not, it’s going to be a bad day for Iran, very bad.”
Trump held talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday and said he insisted to Israel’s leader that negotiations with Iran needed to continue. Netanyahu is urging the administration to press Tehran to scale back its ballistic missile program and end its support for militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah as part of any deal.
Iran has insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. Before the June war, Iran had been enriching uranium up to 60% purity, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels.
The USS Ford, meanwhile, first set sail in late June 2025, which means the crew will soon have been deployed for eight months. While it is unclear how long the ship will remain in the Middle East, the move sets the crew up for an unusually long deployment.
The Navy’s top officer, Adm. Daryl Caudle, told reporters last month that keeping the Ford longer at sea would be “highly disruptive” and that he was “a big non-fan of extensions.”
Carriers are typically deployed for six or seven months. “When it goes past that, that disrupts lives, it disrupts things … funerals that were planned, marriages that were planned, babies that were planned,” Caudle said.
He said extending the Ford would complicate its maintenance and upkeep by throwing off the schedule of repairs, adding more wear and tear, and increasing the equipment that will need attention.
For comparison, the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower had a nine-month deployment to the Middle East in 2023 and 2024, when it spent much of its time engaged with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. The ship entered maintenance in early 2025 as scheduled, but it blew past its planned completion date of July and remains in the shipyard to this day.
Caudle told The Associated Press in a recent interview that his vision is to deploy smaller, newer ships when possible instead of consistently turning to huge aircraft carriers.
Iran faces still-simmering anger over its wide-ranging suppression of dissent. That rage may intensify in the coming days as families of the dead begin the traditional 40-day mourning for loved ones. Already, online videos have shown mourners gathering in different parts of the country, holding portraits of their dead.
One video purported to show mourners at a graveyard in Iran’s Razavi Khorasan province on Thursday. There, with a large portable speaker, people sang the patriotic song “Ey Iran,” which dates to 1940s Iran under the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
While initially banned after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s theocratic government has played it to drum up support
