FOUND AT SEA
The Navy built its first modern minesweeper during the 1940s. The fleet proved critical during World War II for clearing heavily mined waters in the Pacific for warships to pass ahead of large amphibious assaults, such as the war-defining Battle of Okinawa. Some of those ships were then recommissioned to do the same job during the Korean War after hundreds of Soviet-made mines were dropped by the North Koreans. Decades later, the Korean-era ships were part of an international effort led by the British in the Persian Gulf to try to keep the shipping lanes safe during the mining campaigns of the Iran-Iraq War. And then again in 1991, those old minesweepers – along with the first commissioned Avenger ship – were in the same waters struggling to clear a path for U.S. warships to approach the coast of Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War. Two U.S. vessels had been damaged by mines. After the war ended, the minesweeper units trolled the waters off Kuwait to find and disarm the
more than 1,000 mines Iraq had dropped in concentric arcs for miles. As the rest of the new class of minesweepers were commissioned, they deployed to the region and became a regular fixture there. The Avenger-class ships were called into service during the 2003 invasion of Iraq to stand ready for any mining near an Iraqi port that would be key for getting supplies and humanitarian aid into the country during the war. Iran, which is also believed to have thousands of naval mines, has stepped up its aggressiveness in the Persian Gulf in recent weeks. He knew of only one time when the crew was able to find a mine, and that was during a training exercise when it had the GPS coordinates for it. The mines are dropped into the sea and explode when ships pass. Iran’s arsenal includes a mix of cheaper, older ones that float and blow up on impact, and more sophisticated ones that can be dropped from planes. They sit on the ocean floor and explode after detecting nearby ships. “We certainly have the ability to do it,” Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said last month about closing the Strait of Hormuz (a critical commercial passageway). “But we certainly don’t want to do it because the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf are our lifeline.”
The USS Devastator, a Navy minesweeper, is pulled into position as it arrives in Bahrain in 2012. (Jayme Pastoric/U.S. Navy)
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February 2020
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