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US Defense Secretary James Mattis

US Defense Secretary James Mattis said that the USS Carl Vinson, an American aircraft carrier, was heading for waters in the West Pacific near the Korean Peninsula because “that’s where we thought it was most prudent to have her at this time.”

“There’s not a specific demand signal or specific reason we’re sending her up there,” he said.

Mattis’s remarks are being taken to mean that the carrier was not relocated because North Korea is about to carry out a sixth nuclear weapons test or in order to take military action, such as launching a preemptive strike on the North.

“She’s stationed in the Western Pacific for a reason. She operates freely up and down the Pacific,” Mattis said during a press conference about events in North Korea and Syria at the Defense Department in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 11.

When asked whether the USS Carl Vinson‘s route had been announced in advance to send a signal to North Korea, Mattis said, “It’s because she was originally headed in one direction [Australia] for an exercise, and we canceled our role in that exercise, and that‘s what became public. We had to explain why she wasn’t in that exercise.”

The USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier

It was when the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike force, which had been scheduled to head from Singapore to Australia for the exercise, abruptly changed course for the Korean Peninsula that rumors began to spread about the US bombing North Korea.

“The number one threat in the region continues to be North Korea, due to its reckless, irresponsible, and destabilizing program of missile tests and pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability,” said Commander Dave Benham, spokesperson for the US Pacific Command, on Apr. 9 during the announcement that the carrier strike force had changed directions. Benham‘s remarks suggested that North Korea’s provocations were the reason for the carrier’s redeployment.

Japanese analysts believe that the USS Carl Vinson’s change of course is designed to fill a strategic vacuum in US forces at the present moment. “Since the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, which is based at Yokosuka Naval Base [in Japan], is inactive from January to April because of inspections and repairs, [the USS Carl Vinson] was deployed to fill a gap [in the West Pacific region],” wrote Tetsuro Kosaka, a staff writer for the Nihon Keizai Shinbun and an expert on Japanese security, in a column for the newspaper on Apr. 11. Though the USS Carl Vinson is in charge of the East Pacific, the fact that it is heading toward the Korean Peninsula (located in the West Pacific) cannot be regarded as an increased American military presence in the region, he argued.

The important question, Kosaka said, is whether the USS Carl Vinson will remain in the area around the Korean Peninsula even after maintenance on the USS Ronald Reagan concludes in May. “If there are two aircraft carriers operating near the Korean Peninsula, that would confirm an American troop buildup, and that‘s when tensions on the Korean Peninsula would start to mount in the true sense of the word,” he wrote.

By Yi Yong-in and Cho Ki-weon, Washington and Tokyo correspondents

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