In June 2024, the U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship USS Wasp and the Marines aboard were sent to the eastern Mediterranean to serve as a deterrent and provide the U.S. military with options as tensions continued to rise between Hezbollah and Israel along the border with Lebanon, according to three U.S. officials at the time.
The officials stressed that the ship's movement was not an indication that the U.S. was planning to evacuate American citizens from Lebanon, but that it was moving for deterrence purposes similar to the earlier deployments of the amphibious ship USS Bataan and the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford following Hamas' October 2023 attack against Israel.
Currently on a scheduled deployment to Europe, the Wasp's transit toward the eastern Mediterranean was intended to deter the conflict between Hamas and Israel from becoming a broader regional war, U.S. officials said. The ship's move "was being done for deterrence purposes and to promote regional stability," said one of the officials.
The Wasp was joined in the eastern Mediterranean by the USS Oak Hill, which had already been operating in the region. According to a U.S. official, the USS New York, the third ship that made up the Wasp's Amphibious Ready Group, soon followed to also deploy to the eastern Mediterranean.
Amphibious Ready Groups and the 2,200 Marines aboard are trained for a wide variety of missions, including the evacuation of large numbers of American citizens from conflict zones. However, the Wasp was not currently carrying tilt-rotor MV-22 Osprey aircraft that could have been used to transport personnel long distances.
Another U.S. official stressed that the Wasp's movement toward the eastern Mediterranean was intended to provide American leaders with options and that no decision had been made for the ship and its Marines to assist in evacuating U.S. citizens from Lebanon.
The deployment came amid an escalation in clashes between Israeli and Hezbollah forces along the border between Israel and Lebanon, increasing concerns that Israel could soon be engaged in a second war. U.S. efforts to secure a diplomatic resolution to the tensions along that border had so far been unsuccessful.
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