The USS Gravely, a Navy destroyer, is making its way from Yorktown, Va. toward the waters off the Texas coast.
The Gravely is a massive ship, outfitted with sophisticated radar and communication equipment as well as weapons such as guided missiles and torpedoes. Before being assigned to the Gulf, the ship’s mission was to counter drone and missile attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen.
The ship will have a Coast Guard law enforcement team onboard, and is expected to be part of a larger coordinated military response to fight what the Defense Department describes as “maritime-related terrorism, weapons proliferation, transnational crime, piracy, and illegal seaborne immigration.”
Justin Katz, Navy and Marine Corps reporter for Breaking Defense, spoke to Texas Standard about the Gravely’s capabilities and mission. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, I know the Pentagon sent something like a thousand Army personnel and 500 Marines to the southern border… But a destroyer armed with tomahawks and torpedoes? What’s the anticipated role for such a vessel?
Justin Katz: Yeah. So it is a bit of an unusual situation. What we know about the Gravely’s mission right now is they’re going to be involved in what’s called “maritime interdiction.”
And put simply, that’s when you have small boats probably traveling from Central or South America, they’re suspected of carrying drugs, weapons, potentially people, they’re trying to enter the United States legally by sea… And the Gravely’s mission is really simple. It’s to find and stop these boats from reaching the United States.
So they’re gonna work with the Coast Guard and other law enforcement agencies to do just that.
Why wouldn’t you just use Coast Guard vessels? Why do you need a destroyer?
Well, that’s a good question, and that’s a big reason why folks think that this is a very unusual deployment. A destroyer is really the epitome of what most people think of when they think of a warship.
It is really kind of overkill, frankly, so that is why this is so unusual.
Well, you think about where this particular vessel has been. I understand it just completed a nine-month deployment escorting aircraft carriers in the Red Sea, shooting down missiles and drones launched by Houthi militants in Yemen… But that was mostly a defensive response to attacks on a busy shipping lane.
How could the Gravely’s capabilities be used conceptually in the Gulf? I mean, I’m not aware of any land-launched missiles or drones threatening the Gulf right now.
Sure. And you’re spot on in what the Gravely was doing in the Middle East. And that is much more the kind of mission destroyers usually take on.
Where the Gravely will be useful in the Gulf is that all of these destroyers – they’re called Arleigh Burke-class destroyers – they have multiple radars and sensors that can communicate with Navy planes in the area, which we have been told there will be certain maritime intelligence planes operating in the Gulf. They can also communicate with the Coast Guard.
So as these small boats are trying to make their way through the Gulf undetected, the Gravely and other Coast Guard units have a variety of ways of finding, tracking, and spotting them.
Just gaming this out: This is the unspoken predicate, I suppose — if a U.S. warship were to fire one of its missiles at, say, a cartel headquarters in Mexican sovereign territory, surely that would be construed as an act of war, I would imagine.
Well, I’m not a lawyer, so I couldn’t say for sure. But I would say it would be a very extreme and unusual circumstance for that to happen.
And again, that’s why, you know, I said earlier, this is such an unusual situation because you just don’t need a destroyer to deal with a drug runner.
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Well, while we’re gaming things out, since we’ve seen our relationship with Mexico strained over immigration and more recently this potential trade war, is it possible we’re looking at a new kind of gunboat diplomacy here? I’m just wondering what this represents in the larger context.
Yeah, so the Pentagon would call it a show of force. And to be clear, nobody has said that out loud, but the Pentagon doesn’t always need to say that. It’s a show of force in the sense that historically, we don’t send Navy destroyers after drug smugglers. That’s not business as usual.
And two, from a practical standpoint, the Navy and the Coast Guard have plenty of other assets that could do this mission. So it could be construed as gunboat diplomacy in the sense that there are bodies of water around the world where commercial ships expect to see military forces and the U.S. Navy knows and values the fact that it can send a ship to one of those areas and their presence will send a message.
Sending a destroyer to the Gulf, where nobody usually sees destroyers, absolutely sends a message.
