NAVAL STATION NORFOLK, Va.  — More than 6,000 sailors from the ships of Carrier Strike Group 10 returned home to their homeports in Norfolk and Mayport, Florida today, finishing a 213-day deployment that saw 194-days underway — 152 of which were spent in combat operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

"Since leaving in June, these sailors have been in almost continuous combat operations over Iraq and Syria and near Yemen in the Red Sea," said Adm. Philip S. Davidson, commander of Fleet Forces who was on hand at Pier 14 to welcome home the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower, the lead ship of CSG-10.

"Their missions included aviation strikes against Islamic State fighters as well as land and sea operations to defend the flow of maritime trade and traffic in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean," Davidson said.

Davidson lauded not only the carrier strike operations, but also the work of two of the group's guided missile destroyers involved in attacks near Yemen in October.

"While conducting operations in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the USS Mason defended itself and other U.S. ships from multiple anti-ship cruise missiles during the week of Oct. 9. In response to those threats, sailors aboard USS Nitze swiftly carried out an offensive Tomahawk strike against three radar sites along the Yemeni Coast," according to Davidson.

Along with the carrier Ike and guided-missile destroyers Mason and Nitze, the guided-missile cruiser San Jacinto also returned to Norfolk while guided-missile destroyer Roosevelt is returning to its homeport of Mayport.

The aircraft of Carrier Air Wing 3, embarked on Ike, returned to their five separate home bases around the United States on Dec. 28.

Rear Adm. James Malloy, CSG-10 commander, said that his success on the deployment was due to the readiness of his crew, which was assisted in part by the Navy's new Optimized Fleet Response Plan.

"It was a successful deployment by any measure," Mallow said to reporters on Pier 14 once the ship tied up.

"I got a better, more ready battle group from the beginning," Malloy said of the new OFRP. "We were all aligned and we knew what we were going to do. We knew what ships we were going to deploy with earlier and we were allowed the oversight of that maintenance process so all our ships were ready and could maintain that readiness throughout the deployment."

It was that reworked training cycle, he says, that next to his sailors, helped make the deployment successful — including how the destroyers Mason and Nitze also performed under the stress of combat.

"I don't think the blood pressure went up at all, this is a very capable strike group and I think everybody knows that," Malloy said. "We found when we got out to the Arabian Gulf that our training prepared us for the operations we had out there — we were fully prepared for any contingency, any operations that would be done against us by any potential adversary, so we fell back on the training that occurred before we deployed."

About Mark D. Faram

Mark D. Faram is a former reporter for Navy Times. He was a senior writer covering personnel, cultural and historical issues. A nine-year active duty Navy veteran, Faram served from 1978 to 1987 as a Navy Diver and photographer.

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