steventhedev OP , 6 months ago

There are basically three reasons they would withdraw the CSG:

1. They believe the situation is sufficiently stable and withdrawing the CSG will not encourage Iranian backed groups to escalate too much.
2. They want to signal to Israel that ground operations need to wind down within days.
3. This is part of regular deployment changes and a replacement force will be deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Given the US were running 24/7 surveillance flights over Gaza, 2 is highly unlikely and there would be other signals like the State department sending that signal.

Option 1 is similarly unlikely given the regional escalations.

Which leaves option 3. Which makes tons of sense and shows military doctrines that are similar - Israel is rotating 5 brigades of reserve troops out of Gaza.

My prediction is that Hezbollah will take a day or two with far fewer rocket launches on Israeli civilians, and then around Jan 3 or 4 they will launch a much larger salvo to test the US response. Hamas already jumped on this, launching 20-some rockets. I haven’t seen an explicit Houthi response yet, but the Eisenhower is closer to them than the Ford so I don’t think they’ll pay close attention to this beyond some saber rattling.