USS Enterprise
The current USS Enterprise, the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, is positioned in the Red Sea with a carrier strike group attached to it which includes the guided missile cruiser USS Leyte Gulf, guided-missile destroyers USS Bulkeley, USS Barry and USS Mason, and the fast combat support ship USNS Arctic.
On February 16 Enterprise and Kearsarge, the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group and Expeditionary Strike Group 5, met up in the Red Sea leading to the Suez Canal which USS Kearsarge and USS Ponce passed through on March 1 to the Mediterranean Sea and the American naval base in Souda Bay, Crete.
The New York Times laid out further options in addition to the stationing of American warships off the shores of Libya. They include several offered by planners on the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff and its field commands:
Signal jamming "aircraft operating in international air space," thus disabling "Libyan government communications with its military units."
"Administration officials said Sunday [March 6] that preparations for such an operation were under way."
The aforementioned use of the Kearsarge and the Ponce amphibious assault ships, "Known as a Marine Air-Ground Task Force," which "provides a complete air, sea and land force that can project its power quickly and across hundreds of miles, either from flat-decked ships in the Mediterranean Sea or onto a small beachhead on land."
"In this task force are Harrier jump-jet warplanes, which not only can bomb, strafe and engage in dogfights, but can also carry surveillance pods for monitoring military action on the ground in Libya; attack helicopters; transport aircraft - both cargo helicopters and the fast, long-range Osprey, whose rotors let it lift straight up, then tilt forward like propellers to ferry Marines...across the desert; landing craft that can cross the surf anywhere along Libyas' long coastline - and about 400 ground combat troops of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines."
Other operations being planned are air-dropping weapons to insurgents in the country and "inserting small Special Operations teams...to assist the rebels, as was done in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban."
Another option is to launch a "handful of strikes on valued government or military targets...as was done in the Gulf of Sidra raids in 1986," by the Ronald Reagan administration.
"There are ample planes based in Europe and on the aircraft carrier Enterprise and its strike group, now in the Red Sea, for missions over Libya.
"Pentagon officials said Sunday that those vessels were carefully sailing in the direction of the Suez Canal, gateway to the Mediterranean."
USS Enterprise, should it join other U.S. and NATO nations' warships in the Mediterranean, will provide as many as 85 aircraft.
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