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The U.S. Naval Air Station Keflavik in Iceland will formally close on Saturday after more than 50 years of operation, leaving essentially no military presence whatsoever in all of Iceland. U.S. forces in Iceland once included some 5,000 personnel as well as fighter jets, maritime patrol planes, combat search-and-rescue transports and helicopters, tankers, and a small detachment of U.S. Marine Corps Security Forces. The U.S. presence has already been drawn down to only a few hundred personnel and a couple of warplanes.
Keflavik served as the host command for NATO in Iceland and has been a key strategic location for U.S. forces. In World War II, Iceland was an essential basing point for anti-submarine patrols for interdicting German U-boats transiting to the North Atlantic, where they would wreak havoc with Allied convoys from the United States; and Keflavik is situated in the middle of the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gap, perhaps the most significant naval chokepoint of the Cold War.
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