USS Kitty Hawk to join 4 other carriers for Gulf duty
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The USS Kitty Hawk will be going to the Middle East.
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SPECIAL REPORT
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Orders telling one more Navy aircraft carrier battle group to be prepared to go to the Middle East were to be signed Thursday by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, according to Pentagon officials.
The Navy will add the USS Kitty Hawk, based in Japan, to the four carriers already in or heading to the region in preparation for a possible war with Iraq.
The five carriers would be one less than were in the Middle East region during the 1991 Gulf War.
The departure of the Kitty Hawk from the Pacific region would not leave that area uncovered. Military planners will put the carrier USS Carl Vinson in the region as a precaution as tensions continue with North Korea, according to military officials.
The Carl Vinson is currently west of Hawaii.
The carriers with deployment orders for the region so far are the USS Constellation, already in the Persian Gulf; the USS Harry S. Truman, operating in the eastern Mediterranean Sea; the USS Abraham Lincoln, returning to the Persian Gulf and now in the North Arabian Sea; and the USS Theodore Roosevelt, now headed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
The Navy is also ready to deploy the USS Nimitz, but deployment orders are not expected at this time for that carrier, Pentagon officials said Thursday.
