6th Fleet Maneuvers Begin Near Sicily : Navy Exercise Shifted Away From Libya in Bid to Defuse Tensions

Just a week after U.S. fighter jets downed a pair of Libyan warplanes, the U.S. Navy has gathered an armada of 27 ships and 150 aircraft in the Mediterranean Sea for six days of maneuvers, the Pentagon said Thursday.

The exercise, called “National Week,” in which two aircraft carriers and 20,000 sailors are taking part, got under way Thursday and is scheduled to last until next Tuesday, Pentagon officials said. The carrier John F. Kennedy, whose fighter aircraft shot down the two Libyan MIG-23 fighters on Jan. 4, will be joined in the exercise by the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, the Pentagon said.

Lt. Cmdr. James M. Kudla, a Defense Department spokesman, called the operations “routine,” adding that maneuvers by the same name have been scheduled once or twice a year since 1967.

The 6th Fleet exercise takes place as tensions in the Mediterranean are declining. At a 149-nation conference on chemical weapons that ended Wednesday in Paris, American allies urged Washington to act with restraint in the Mediterranean. The message was repeated at the United Nations, where the United States and its allies blocked a resolution Wednesday that deplored the U.S. action against the Libyan fighters.

The United States alleges that Libya is building a plant 40 miles southwest of Tripoli, its capital, to make chemical weapons. The charge heightened tensions between the United States and the North African country, whose leaders declared that a U.S. attack on the new plant is imminent. They cited the April, 1986, bombing attack by the United States on Tripoli and Benghazi, which the Reagan Administration said was in retaliation for Libya’s role in the terrorist bombing of a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen.

Effort to Defuse Tensions

On Wednesday, the United States suspended plans for a naval firing exercise next week in the central Mediterranean, in international waters off the coast of Libya.

Pentagon officials said the unusual step was made to defuse tensions that arose from Washington’s rhetorical campaign against the chemical plant at Rabta and that were heightened by the fighter incident.

The United States chose not to “provoke a rattlesnake,” said one defense official, referring to Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi.

Pentagon officials said that the “National Week” maneuvers, planned for almost six months, will go on essentially as planned. But a State Department official said that the maneuvers now are scheduled to take place in “a place farther from Libya than originally scheduled.”

The movement of ships and planes reportedly will be concentrated in the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily, which is near the 6th Fleet’s headquarters in Naples.

While outside of the range of Libyan fighter jets, the operating area is within two days’ sailing time from the Libyan coast.

“We are not trying to raise tensions,” the State Department official said. “The operation was moved so that no one will misperceive it as a provocation to the Libyans.”

Asked if it might not have been better to have moved it even farther from Libya, the official said that “the military makes its own mind up” about such things.

Pentagon spokesman Kudla indicated, however, that the exercise may be spread over large sections of international waters in the Mediterranean.

“The nature of battle group operations is that (the ships) don’t have to be operating side by side,” said Kudla.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this report.