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The United States is in the process of shifting its P-3C Orion long-range maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) aircraft away from the Russian Northern Fleet. On Sept. 30, Naval Air Station (NAS) Keflavik in Iceland will formally close, though most of the Orions already have been transferred back to the continental United States. Iceland is situated in the middle of the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gap, the most strategically significant naval battleground of the Cold War and the historical chokepoint and gateway to the North Atlantic. It has held absolutely pivotal strategic importance since the time German U-boats wreaked havoc in the North Atlantic.
This transit was so important during the Cold War that the United States lined the ocean floor with the hydrophone sensors of the Sound Surveillance System, popularly known as the SOSUS warning network, which was designed to detect and track scores of Soviet submarines pouring across during a major European war. Even when it was first built, the system was so sensitive that it could track a specific ship from the continental United States and distinguish between different submarines of the same class based on minute differences in their acoustic signature. The complete closure of NAS Keflavik marks the end of an era.
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