How the US has shifted military jets and ships in the Middle East

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. is shifting military aircraft and warships into and around the Middle East to protect Israel from Iranian attacks as President Donald Trump warns Tehran to step back from the conflict.

Trump's social media posts saying his patience with Iran was “wearing thin" have raised the possibility of deepening U.S. involvement, perhaps by using the bunker-busting bomb to strike a key Iranian nuclear site built deep underground in the mountains.

Israel doesn't have the massive munition it would take to destroy the Fordo nuclear fuel enrichment plant, or the aircraft needed to deliver it. Only the U.S. does.

As America's national security leaders discuss the next steps, the Pentagon has moved to ensure that its troops and bases in the region are protected.

Here’s a look at the U.S. military presence in the Middle East:

In a social media post, Trump warned that “we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.”

U.S. officials insisted as of Tuesday that the American military has not taken any offensive actions against Iran, only defensive strikes to take out incoming Iranian missiles to protect Israel.

Additional U.S. fighter jets and refueling tankers have been deployed to the region, but officials have declined to provide specific numbers. Fighter jets have joined in launching strikes to defend Israel, but officials said Tuesday that no American aircraft were over Iran.

Aurora Intel, a group that reviews open source information in real time in the Middle East, said the U.S. Air Force had put additional refueling aircraft and fighter jets in strategic locations across Europe, including England, Spain, Germany and Greece. The information was obtained from public aviation tracking websites.

On Tuesday, the U.S. relocated a dozen F-16s from a base in Italy to Prince Sultan, in Saudi Arabia, Aurora Intel said.

U.S. fighter jets have been patrolling the skies around the Middle East to protect personnel and installations, and bases in the region are on heightened alert and are taking additional security precautions, the officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not provided any details, but said on Fox News Channel late Monday that the military movements were to “ensure that our people are safe.”

American warships also are shooting down Iranian ballistic missiles targeting Israel, with the USS The Sullivans and the USS Arleigh Burke launching strikes over the weekend.

The Sullivans has been joined in the Eastern Mediterranean this week by the USS Thomas Hudner to continue those defense strikes, while the Arleigh Burke has moved away from the area, according to a U.S. official.

The USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier is in the Arabian Sea with the four warships in its strike group. They are not participating in the defense of Israel. But they are positioned to provide security for U.S. troops and bases along the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf.

The USS Nimitz has been long scheduled to take over for the Carl Vinson and is heading west from the Indo-Pacific region toward the Middle East. The official said it is slated to arrive by the end of the month, and the two carriers would likely overlap at least for a short time before the Vinson heads home to San Diego.

The USS Gerald R. Ford is sailing for the European theater of command in a week as well. While the deployment was already scheduled and was not in response to the conflict, the presence of the aircraft carrier, with its accompanying warships, will give the president the option of a third carrier group in the region if needed.

There also are destroyers in the Red Sea, and others are based in the Western Mediterranean and participating in exercises in the Baltic Sea.

The forces in the region have been taking precautionary measures for days, including having military dependents voluntarily leave bases, in anticipation of potential strikes and to protect personnel in case of a large-scale response from Tehran.

Officials said they were not aware of many families actually leaving.

Typically around 30,000 troops are based in the Middle East, and about 40,000 troops are in the region now, according to a U.S. official.

That number surged as high as 43,000 last October in response to heightened tensions between Israel and Iran as well as continuous attacks on commercial and military ships in the Red Sea by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen.

The Air Force's B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is the only aircraft that can carry the 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, known as the bunker buster.

The powerful bomb uses its weight and sheer kinetic force to reach deeply buried targets — and then explode.

There are currently no B-2 bombers in the Middle East region, although there are B-52 bombers based at Diego Garcia, and they can deliver smaller munitions.

If tapped for use, the B-2 bombers would have to make the 30-hour round trip from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, refueling multiple times.

AP writer Sam Mednick in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Tara Copp in Washington contributed to this report.

FILE - The USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier is escorted into a navy port in Busan, South Korea, March 2, 2025. (Son Hyung-ju/Yonhap via AP, File)

FILE - This photograph released by the U.S. Navy shows a MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter hovering over the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier while operating in the Middle East April 12, 2025. (Petty Officer 3rd Class Nathan Jordan/U.S. Navy via AP, File)

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fields questions on the Pentagon budget from the House Armed Services Committee, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, June 12, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - This image taken from video provided by the U.S. Navy shows an aircraft launching from the USS Harry S. Truman in the Red Sea before airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, March 15, 2025. (U.S. Navy via AP, File)

ATLANTA (AP) — Eliminating state income taxes sounds great to many voters, but Republicans backing the push in multiple states still face questions about whether such big tax cuts can be made without raising other taxes or sharply cutting state funding for education, health care and other services.

Georgia on Wednesday became the latest state to launch a bid to abolish its personal income tax, with Republican leaders in the Senate backing a proposal to zero it out by 2032. This year, Georgia's personal income tax is projected to collect about $16.5 billion, or 44% of the state's general revenue.

The push is driven by politics. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, the Republican who leads the state Senate, has made eliminating income taxes a centerpiece of his 2026 campaign for governor. State Sen. Blake Tillery, a Vidalia Republican who led a committee to abolish the tax, is among candidates to succeed Jones as lieutenant governor.

“This is the first vote that we are going to get to take to address affordability,” Tillery said.

But it's unclear if the proposal will pass. Georgia House Republicans may want to continue nibbling away at the tax in smaller bites, preferring a “measured” approach. Republican House Speaker Jon Burns of Newington said Wednesday that his big 2026 goal is to eliminate property taxes for homeowners, but said he's willing to consider the Senate plan.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, serving his last year, has been cool to total elimination of the income tax. He declined to comment Wednesday on the Senate plan, but spokesperson Carter Chapman said Kemp wants "to continue lowering taxes and putting more money in Georgians’ pockets as he has throughout his term.”

The state's Democratic minority opposes the move, saying it would mostly benefit high earners and the state needs money to provide services.

Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi and Missouri have all set goals to abolish the personal income tax, joining eight other states that don't tax personal income. Eight other states besides Georgia are cutting personal income tax rates this year, according to the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C., group generally skeptical of higher taxes.

“We've seen a lot of states cut their income tax rates in the last four or five years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and coming out of it,” said Aravind Boddupalli, senior researcher at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Supporters say cuts help a state compete for new residents and businesses, pointing to growth in Texas and Florida, two states without personal income taxes.

“Your income tax is a tax on productivity,” said Manish Bhatt, who studies state taxes for the Tax Foundation. “If you are taxing productivity, you are potentially losing out on economic gains.”

Georgia has already been cutting income taxes, taking what was once a top income tax rate of 6% and lowering it to a 5.19% flat rate. Republicans broadly support a further cut for individual and corporate taxpayers to 4.99% this year, worth an estimated $800 million in foregone tax revenue.

The Senate plan would then freeze the corporate rate and focus on individual tax cuts. It proposes in 2027 to exempt the first $50,000 of income for a single person or $100,000 for a married couple, up from $12,000 and $24,000 now.

Faced with Democratic criticism about affordability, the big increase in exempt income is central to Republicans' own arguments about how they can make money stretch farther. About 70% of Georgians reported less than $100,000 of taxable income in 2024, according to state figures.

“It is a plan that gives benefits first to hardworking families,” Tillery said.

The initial rate cut, plus the exemption proposal, would lower Georgia revenue by $3.8 billion in its 2027 budget year. Tillery says the state could pay by using surplus tax revenue and shifting back to paying for capital expenditures through borrowing instead of cash. But those moves probably wouldn't cover the foregone revenue even in the first year, much less $13 billion more in cuts to get to zero.

Tillery said revenue should be bolstered by trimming business income and sales tax breaks, saying legislators should reduce “corporate welfare.” But lawmakers and Kemp have balked at curtailing those measures in recent years.

Tax cuts haven't always been a political bonanza. In Kansas, after Republicans under Gov. Sam Brownback cut income taxes steeply more than a decade ago, voters revolted at budget cuts and lawmakers imposed multiple tax increases to cover persistent budget shortfalls, including restoring some income tax cuts. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly won her first term in 2018 by framing the race as a referendum on Brownback’s policies.

“State income taxes are only bad if you fundamentally don't believe that the services, the public investments that state governments provide, are worth anything,” said Matt Gardner, a senior fellow with the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy .

In Missouri, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe and GOP legislative leaders have made phasing out the state’s income tax a top priority for the session starting Wednesday. They're looking to expand sales taxes to services which currently are untaxed to help offset lost revenue.

“We want to do this in a smart, efficient way that’s not going to have the state go off some sort of fiscal cliff,” Missouri House Majority Leader Alex Riley told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

But expanding sales taxes could fall more heavily on poorer taxpayers. The liberal-leaning Georgia Budget and Policy Institute estimated that if Georgia doesn't expand its sales tax, the combined state and local sales tax rate would have to rise sharply from the current 7.42% to recover revenue losses.

All that leads to questions about income-tax elimination plans, even from Republicans. Burns, the Georgia House speaker, said he's “open” to any plan that benefits Georgians.

“But we've got to have the details, and it has to work,” Burns said. “We need to make sure we can continue to do vital services — health care, public safety, education, all the things we talked about.”

Associated Press writer David Lieb contributed from Jefferson City, Missouri.

FILE - Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones speaks at a rally kicking off his 2026 campaign for governor, Aug. 26, 2025, in Flovilla, Ga. (AP Photo/Jeff Amy, File)