The USS George Washington is leaving the Pacific to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, a swap driven by mounting reports of crew mental health strain and supply problems after the Lincoln's deployment stretched well past its original May return date.
This leaves the western Pacific without a US carrier while China conducts naval drills with Indonesia and stages military exercises near the Scarborough Shoal and off Japan's Okinotori island, actions analysts say Beijing is using to signal that America is distracted.
Analysts including Greg Poling of CSIS note the administration says the Western Hemisphere and Pacific are top priorities, yet the deployments are doing the opposite, concentrating assets around Iran instead.
A Special Operations Command admiral toured Manila this week promising Filipino counterparts that the US can still project force globally and will 'redeploy and reorient' once the Middle East is handled, a timeline nobody in the story attaches a date to.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.