Washington, DC. More fallout is falling in Washington as the White House is dealing daily with Trump’s “lost armada'” a reference to the US Navy Carrier Strike Force that supposedly was headed for North Korea, only to end up in Australia.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has denied being misleading about a US carrier strike group’s push toward the Korean peninsula, saying it never gave an arrival date and that the ships were still on their way, despite reports of their presence elsewhere.
President Trump boasted early last week that he had sent an “armada” as a warning to North Korea, but in fact the USS Carl Vinson strike group was still far from the Korean peninsula, and headed in the opposite direction.
America’s US military’s Pacific Command explained on Tuesday that the strike group first had to complete a planned period of training with Australia but was now heading toward the Western Pacific. Which of course makes zero sense, if you truly have a dangerous person armed with nuclear weapons you must get to at once.
“The President said that we have an armada going towards the peninsula. That’s a fact. It happened. It is happening, rather,” said White House spokesman Sean Spicer.
Still the strike group first headed elsewhere, On April 15, the US Navy even published a photo showing the Vinson transiting the Sunda Strait on its way to drills with Australia.
US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis looked to address confusion over the issue on Wednesday, telling reporters travelling with him in the Middle East that the alteration in the Vinson’s schedule had been disclosed in the interest of transparency.
The US deployment of naval vessels to a hostile area is similar to the Tonkin Gulf incident, where the US sent vessels into North Vietnamese hostile waters and used an alleged attack as grounds for mass escalation of America into the Vietnam War