Secretary Carlos Del Toro met behind closed doors at Naval Air Station Oceana with roughly 50 members of Carrier Air Wing 3 squadrons who returned home from the Red Sea in July.
“We haven't seen attacks like this on the United States Navy and incidents involving merchant mariners since World War II,” Del Toro said. “The intensity of those nine months was extraordinary and so but I did ask them a lot of questions about what it was like.”
The air crews for USS Eisenhower strike group spent 7 months in the Red Sea over a nine-month deployment. Del Toro thanked them for their commitment.
“There's a lot of tactical issues that we discussed, with regards to rules of engagements and target selections and things like that that I can't talk about publicly,” he said.
The air wing logged more than 31,000 flight hours and more than 10,000 launches and recoveries while shooting down drones and missiles and bombing launch sites controlled by Houthi Rebels in Yemen.
“To be able to gain this experience is an extraordinary thing, and I shared with them that actually, they will be the mentors to our future aviators who decide to join naval aviation in the future,” Del Toro said.
The U.S. continues a naval build up in the Middle East, as Iran vows to retaliate for an attack that killed a Hamas leader inside Iran and escalating fighting between Israel and Hezbollah across the Israeli border with Lebanon.
“We will sustain this up tempo as long as we have to. But obviously we don't want to sustain it. We want to try to reach a diplomatic solution in Gaza in some form or fashion,” he said.
The Norfolk-based USS Truman is expected to deploy to the Middle East in the fall.
