Pentagon orders B-52 flights to Middle East to deter attacks on U.S. troops by Iran

Two U.S. B-52 bombers flew a show-of-force mission in the Persian Gulf on Thursday that military officials said was intended to deter Iran and its proxies from carrying out attacks against American troops in the Middle East amid rising tensions between the two countries.

The warplanes’ 36-hour round-trip mission from

Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana was the second time in three weeks that Air Force bombers had conducted long-range flights near Iranian air space on short notice. The United States periodically conducts such quick demonstration missions to the Middle East and Asia to underscore U.S. air power to allies and adversaries, but the two missions within a month is unusual.

The multinational mission, which included aircraft from Saudi Arabia,

Qatar and Bahrain, was routed well outside Iranian air space. The U.S. warplanes were in the broader Gulf region for about two hours before returning home, officials said.

The flight Thursday comes on the heels of the assassination last month of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, an attack Iran has blamed on Israel with possible U.S. complicity.

Military officials declined to say what live munitions, if any, the aircraft carried on their recent missions, but in recent years the hulking bombers have conducted strikes with laser-guided conventional bombs against insurgent targets in Afghanistan.

Even as American officials sought to cast the flights as defensive in nature, President Donald Trump’s top national security advisers had days earlier dissuaded him — at least for now — from considering bombing Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks.

In a briefing before the mission Thursday, a senior military official said American intelligence analysts had detected “planning going on” — including preparations for possible rocket strikes or worse – by Iran and Shia militias in Iraq that it supports.

Over the past year, Iranian-aligned proxies in Iraq have conducted more than 50 rocket attacks on bases where American troops are housed, as well as on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and launched 90 attacks on convoys carrying supplies to American troops, according to the Pentagon.

The senior military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, did not cite any specific evidence of a larger, imminent attack against American personnel. But the official said military analysts assessed that the likelihood of Iran or its proxies miscalculating the risks of such a strike were higher than usual.