In Harm’s Way?

Meghann Myers of  Navy Times reports that:

The aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and members of its strike group are heading toward the waters off Yemen to conduct maritime security operations, a 5th Fleet spokesman said Monday.

The TR’s mission has not yet been clearly articulated.  On the one hand:

An unnamed Pentagon official told USA Today that the TR is tracking a convoy of Iranian vessels headed to the Gulf of Aden and will be prepared to block them from delivering arms to the Houthi rebels.

However, on the other hand:

"This is in response to the deteriorating security situation in Yemen," Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren told reporters Monday. "They are not going to intercept Iranian ships."

The ship is appropriately named. It is, indeed, a “big stick.”  One thousand-plus feet and over 100 thousand tons of pure American power.  And it moves at better than thirty knots, recalling the John Paul Jones line:

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way.

Teddy Roosevelt, himself, was an admirer of Jones and had this to say about him:

Every officer . . . should feel in each fiber of his being an eager desire to emulate the energy, the professional capacity, the indomitable determination and dauntless scorn of death which marked John Paul Jones above all his fellows.

So far, however, the John Paul Jones’ line most appropriate to the times would be:

I have not yet begun to fight.