A U.S. Navy-led coalition is succeeding at protecting commercial shipping in the Red Sea from militant attacks, while sailors work at a pace unseen in the Middle East in decades, the commander of the service’s forces in the region said.
American personnel “have been asked to perform at a tempo and at a level that our Navy has not operated in since at least the Tanker War of the ’80s,” Vice Adm. George Wikoff, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/U.S. 5th Fleet, said Thursday.
He was referring to a series of Iranian and Iraqi military attacks from about 1984 to 1988 on commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf. Nowadays, the attackers are Houthi militants in Yemen who are backed by Iran and say they are retaliating against Israel-linked ships, though many of the ships they’ve targeted have no apparent connection to Israel.
Read the rest of the story at STARS and STRIPES, here.
