The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft carrier toward the waters off Iran, a U.S. official told Al Jazeera on Friday, as the war the United States and Israel launched against Tehran in February grinds into its eighth month with no resolution in sight.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group left its home port in San Diego on Sunday, officials said, followed a day later by the Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group, carrying more than 2,000 Marines of the Makin Island Marine Expeditionary Force. By the end of November, the Pentagon expects to have three aircraft carriers and two amphibious landing groups positioned around Iran at once, with additional F-35 squadrons layered on top of the roughly 50,000 American troops already stationed across the region.
That would be the largest concentration of U.S. carrier power in the Gulf in more than two decades. Officials said the goal is to keep military options on the table for President Trump regardless of how diplomacy unfolds; the Pentagon does not plan to withdraw any of the assets even if Washington and Tehran eventually reach an agreement.
A war with no clear end date
The conflict began on Feb. 28, when the U.S. and Israel opened what Washington called Operation Epic Fury and Israel called Operation Roaring Lion, a surprise bombing campaign that hit roughly 500 Iranian military targets in a single day and killed Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, along with other senior commanders. Iran answered with missile and drone barrages of its own, and the fighting has continued in waves ever since, repeatedly pulling in Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and Iran-aligned militias in Iraq.
A brief ceasefire in April collapsed within weeks after Iran moved to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz, and shipping through the strait has been disrupted on and off ever since; a supertanker caught fire there this week after being struck, according to Al Jazeera's live coverage of the war. Casualty tolls remain contested: Iranian authorities put their dead at roughly 3,500 with more than 27,000 injured, while some Western estimates put Iranian military losses alone above 6,000. The Pentagon has told Congress the campaign has cost more than $43 billion so far.
The latest carrier movement follows a string of smaller flare-ups. A Saudi-led coalition said this week it intercepted four Houthi drones fired toward southern Saudi Arabia, and the FBI arrested a U.S. Energy Department employee on allegations of providing support to the Houthis. The U.S. also completed its military withdrawal from Iraq after 23 years even as it adds forces elsewhere in the region, a sign of how unevenly the war has reshaped America's footprint in the Middle East.
Sanctions and a sliver of diplomacy
Washington has paired the build-up with an economic squeeze. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration is tightening sanctions on Iran's financial and crypto networks, saying the U.S. is cutting off the Iranian regime's most critical source of revenue, and claiming Iran loaded zero crude oil exports in September.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has continued to signal openness to talks even as the fighting goes on.
Iran "has never avoided dialogue with the U.S., even though it's been attacked three times during negotiations."
Masoud Pezeshkian, President of Iran
Tehran has denied separate reports that it offered nuclear inspectors wider access in exchange for sanctions relief. Analysts who have tracked the military build-up near Iran say the latest deployment is less about any single battle than about Washington signaling it is prepared to sustain the war indefinitely.
With the Roosevelt not due to arrive for weeks, the immediate test will be whether the Strait of Hormuz stays open to commercial traffic, and whether this week's tanker fire proves an isolated incident or the start of another round of attacks on shipping, the flashpoint that has twice already unraveled fragile ceasefires this year.
