Acting US Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has ordered the deployment of more MIM-104 Patriot missile defense systems to the Middle East due to increasing tensions against Iran.
In addition, the US military ordered 250 soldiers to Israel’s Nevatim Airbase to drill them on their ability to “rapidly surge combat-ready forces into and across the theater.
A Pentagon statement said Shanahan had also send the USS Arlington, a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, along with a battery of Patriot missiles and auxiliary equipment to US Central Command (CENTCOM).
The move follows sales worth $6 billion of the mobile surface-to-air missile system to both the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain earlier this week.
Both countries are small US allies in the region, but house major US military bases just a couple of dozen miles from Iranian territory.
The US regime has already deployed a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Persian Gulf in response to what Washington says are growing threats from Iran.
Last month, US President Donald Trump even declared Iran’s elite paramilitary force, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to be a terrorist organization.
Iranian leaders have vowed not to back down before US chest-beating, noting they could, among other things, close the Strait of Hormuz at a moment’s notice. The waterway handles one fifth of the world’s seaborne petroleum traffic.
Sputnik / ABC Flash Point WW III News 2019.
