Talk:Task Force 74

1971 Carrier group deployment - expand info

The following information can be found from the book: The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of Neocons from Nixon to Obama, by Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman regarding the deployment of the carrier.

The carrier was there to try and stop West Pakistan’s collapse. The book confirms that the USS Enterprise task force, Task Force 74, had no orders to attack or engage India. Its purpose was to wave a fist at the Soviet Union, make Moscow worry about confrontation with its Indian Ocean ships and then pressure India into not attacking and humiliating West Pakistan. The idea was to “warn the Soviets not to let their ally India destroy Pakistan.” East Pakistan, modern day Bangladesh, was written off as a lost cause. The idea that the task force was about sending a message to Moscow and not to them may sound strange to Indians, but fit in neatly with a foreign policy that reduced everything to great power rivalries and alliances. Get the big picture straightened out and the small stuff will follow.

Lacking bureaucratic support, the policy was undermined from within. The 1971 tilt to Pakistan was a metaphor for the Nixon administration whose major foreign policy initiatives were done in secrecy and thus implementation was always a problem. So the tilt towards Pakistan was announced, the carrier sent to the Bay of Bengal. But the bureaucracy fought back. Zumwalt, the Joints Chief of Staff head Thomas Moorer and the Pentagon chief Melvin Laird thought the idea of deliberately looking for Soviet ships to confront was just plain dangerous. So the US military first delayed the carrier in Singapore for two days, allowing Indian army to begin the drive that would lead to the defeat of the Pakistani army in the east. They then “further neutralized Nixon’s orders by sending the force to a part of the Indian Ocean where it would have the least chance of bumping against the Soviet naval forces, rather than the best chance, as Nixon had wanted.” In other words, the decision to go into the Bay of Bengal was not about intimidating India it was about avoiding Soviet ships. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Versova (talk • contribs) 01:07, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Task Force 74

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Task Force 74's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "theworldreporter.com":

• From Pakistan–Russia relations: "1971 India Pakistan War: Role of Russia, China, America and Britain". The World Reporter. 2011-10-30. Retrieved 2011-10-30.
• From Indo-Pakistani Naval War of 1971: "1971 India Pakistan War: Role of Russia, China, America and Britain". The World Reporter. 2011-10-30. Retrieved 30 October 2011.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 08:10, 11 February 2016 (UTC)