In the Winter of 1975, relations between the U.S. and the Libyan government of Moamer Kadhafi were almost as bad, in some ways, as U.S. Iranian relations have become under the Current Occupant. Relations were bad to the point that U.S. military and civilian leaders in the Gerald Ford White House cooked up a cockamamie scheme to use the U.S. Navy to provoke armed conflict between the two countries.
The U.S. has had a very long and perilous history of sea and air warfare with Libya, extending for decades. The casus belli justifying the operation in which I became involved, centered principally on Libyan Leader, Kdahafi’s declaration of Libyan sovereignty over the entirety of the Gulf of Sidra, a deep indentation of the Mediterranean Sea that is entirely bounded on three sides by Libyan territory. On the map (right) imagine a line drawn from Banghazi in the East to Misratah in the West. That’s what Kadhafi did in 1973, as he named it the Line of Death and dared the ships and aircraft of the World’s other nations to cross the line at their own peril.
When 1975 began, I was well into a Sixth Fleet deployment of the guided missile destroyer where I served as a Navy lieutenant. We didn’t get home to our base in Mayport, Florida until the next June. But not long after the New Year, we received unexpected and unusual orders. My ship was dispatched to join the antiaircraft screen of an aircraft carrier task force at a rendezvous point just to the North of Kadhafi’s Gulf of Sidra Line of Death. When the full task force had formed, the mission called for the carrier to launch fully armed carrier aircraft to fly East and West, back and forth, inside of the Line, until the Libyan Air Force sortied to defend Libya’s territorial claims to the sea and airspace. When that happened, the fighter aircraft from the carrier and the guided missiles from ships like mine were to engage and destroy the Libyan planes.
When we received my ship’s orders, we were more than two days steaming time away from the rendezvous point. My roommate was the Guided Missile Officer, so he and the sailors and petty officers who worked for him were working like crazy to tune all of their weapons and fire control systems down to the width of a gnat’s ass. The same thing was true for all of the officers and men working in engineering, communications, gunnery, electronic countermeasures and almost every aspect of the ship’s capability and readiness.
Meanwhile, my men and I were hardly more than observers to the super-hyped, veins-in-their-teeth supper aggressive military preparations taking place around us. Our job on our very versatile little warship was to maintain and operate the ship’s systems for finding, tracking and attacking submarines. Libya presented no submarine threat at the ranges where we would be operating. Hence, my sonar, fire control, torpedos, rocket launched torpedos and nuclear depth charges, were altogether superfluous in the mission to which my ship had been assigned. To a degree, the experience had a surreal feel that my men and I were cruise ship passengers and the bully little war about to erupt in our laps was the floor show.
Because someone in Washington apparently came to their senses in time, a US-Libya Winter 1975 live fire Gulf of Sidra dustup was called off, just hours before kickoff. Perhaps that is why I thought of this snippet of my long ago military history when I heard Trump’s insane ranting today about his supposed, aborted Iran provocation. It reminded me that the Pentagon has Raiders of the Lost Ark type warehouses full of files full of bad ideas for how to deploy US military forces outside the context of declared wars.
The aborted mission my ship almost took part in did not come to pass in a vacuum. Already, the US Navy and Libyan Air Force had been belligerently clashing over the Line of Death, as summarized fairly, if sparsely by Wikipedia:
In 1973, Gaddafi claimed much of the Gulf of Sidra to be within Libyan internal waters by drawing a straight line at 32 degrees, 30 minutes north between a point near Benghazi and the western headland of the gulf at Misrata with an exclusive 62 nautical miles (115 km) fishing zone.[8] Gaddafi declared it the Line of Death, the crossing of which would invite a military response. The US claimed its rights to conduct naval operations in international waters, using the modern international standard of 12-nautical-mile (22 km) territorial limit from a country's shore as defined by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.[9] Gaddafi claimed it to be a territorial sea, not just a coastal area. In response the United States authorized Naval exercises in the Gulf of Sidra to conduct Freedom of Navigation (FON) operations.[10]
On 21 March 1973, Libyan fighter planes intercepted and fired on a U.S. Air Force C-130 conducting signals intelligence off the Libyan coast.[11]During the encounter, two Libyan Mirage fighters signaled the C-130 to follow them toward Libya and land, prompting the American plane to take evasive action. The C-130 received cannon fire from the Libyan fighters as it fled, but was able to escape by using cloud cover. According to US officials, the American plane was never closer than 120 kilometers from the Libyan coast.
I resigned my Navy Reserve Commission after Reagan became President because of my utter conviction that the people I saw handling him would find all the worst ways to misuse my very beloved U.S. Navy. Sure enough, again, per Wikipedia:
In the spring of 1986, the U.S. Navy deployed three aircraft carrier task force groups, USS America, USS Coral Sea and USS Saratoga from the Sixth Fleet with 225 aircraft and some 30 warships across the "Line of Death" and into the disputed Gulf of Sidra. After a day of armed conflict, the operation was terminated after an unknown number of human and materiel losses to the Libyan side and no losses to the American side.
Two weeks later on 5 April 1986, a bomb exploded in a West Berlin disco, La Belle, killing two American servicemen, a Turkish woman and wounding 200 others.[13] The United States claimed to have obtained cable transcripts from Libyan agents in East Germany involved in the attack. After several days of diplomatic talks with European and Arab partners, President Ronald Reagan ordered eighteen F-111F strike aircraft of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing, flying from RAF Lakenheath supported by four EF-111A Ravens of the 20th Tactical Fighter Wing, from RAF Upper Heyford in Englandto strike targets in Libya in conjunction with fifteen A-6, A-7, F/A-18 attack aircraft and EA-6B Prowler Electronic Warfare Aircraft from the aircraft carriers USS Saratoga, USS America and USS Coral Sea on station in the Gulf of Sidra. The planes flying from Britain had to fly over the Atlantic, down the coast of Spain, and then turn east into the Mediterranean because the French and Spanish governments refused permission to use their airspace for the attack. This necessitated use of mid-air refueling. The attack lasted about ten minutes, hitting several targets early on 15 April. Two American airmen[14] were killed when their plane was shot down over the Gulf of Sidra. Forty-five Libyan soldiers and government officials and fifteen civilians were also killed.
When I heard the reports of this operation, I instantly recognized the aborted operation my own ship almost took part in, years before, writ large. If this sort of military aggression had been carried out in my own day, I could have been complicit, even though my own little division of the command didn’t directly attack anybody. Fortunately, my life’s circumstances may have permitted me to sidestep ever having to fully explore the ethics of that question.
Yet, I feel hyper-attuned to what today’s sailors, soldiers and marines face as they, too, find themselves hurled into useless posturing, or worse, acts of unjustified aggression.
Add to the list of impeachable offenses: The President Risks the Lives of American Forces for Political Purposes.