Operation Sustain Hope

Operation Sustain Hope was a UN-backed military intervention intended to open a secure route for humanitarian relief into Georgia while imposing a no-fly zone over the country’s west. It brought a Marine expeditionary force and the Thomas Jefferson battle group into the Black Sea, but the mission’s ambitions depended on ships that needed regular replenishment in a sea whose exit could be closed. The contrast between a relief operation’s promise and its exposure to geopolitical and logistical pressure runs through its role in the book.

Background and Mandate

The operation took shape as a response to the prospect of worsening humanitarian need in Georgia, with the Russian winter approaching. The UN Secretary-General requested assistance, and the President agreed to the request, ordering Marine Expeditionary Unit 25 and the Thomas Jefferson battle group into the Black Sea. The decision followed the failure to secure permission for foreign military forces to be based in Turkey, leaving the intervention to operate from the sea rather than from a nearby land base.

The stated purpose was not simply to deploy a visible military presence. The force was to secure port and airfield facilities in and around Poti so that relief supplies could arrive by ship and plane. The port was therefore both a humanitarian gateway and the first practical objective of the operation: without access and protection on the ground, the promised flow of aid could not begin.

The proposal was presented as comparable in scale of ambition to Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, an earlier UN-requested Marine operation described in the book as abortive and expensive. That comparison places Sustain Hope within an established model of intervention while also carrying a warning. A mission framed around relief and peacekeeping could still become difficult to control once military force was required to make its humanitarian purpose possible.

Force and Operational Design

Marine Expeditionary Unit 25 was not technically part of the carrier battle group, although such units were sometimes attached to a group according to deployment and mission. For Sustain Hope, it operated alongside the carrier force as a separately constituted rapid-response formation. Its ships included Little Rock, USS Saipan, and USS Guadalcanal, together with transports and escorts. Their task was to carry a reinforced Marine Battalion Landing Team rapidly wherever it was needed as a peacekeeper force.

The carrier group had a distinct assignment. Its aircraft were to enforce a UN-dictated no-fly zone over western Georgia, preventing air traffic within a designated area marked by Batumi and Sukhumi. The operation thus combined two different forms of control: Marines would help establish a secure entry point for aid, while carrier aircraft would police the airspace. Neither task substituted for the other. The port could receive relief only if facilities were secured, and the no-fly zone depended on aircraft remaining available to enforce it.

The intervention also carried a political ambition beyond its immediate Georgian objectives. UN leaders hoped that a strong military presence could help defuse other disputes in the region; successful enforcement of a UN-mandated peace there would strengthen the idea of a United Nations with teeth. This aspiration made the mission a test of institutional authority as well as a relief effort. Its credibility depended on whether a multinational mandate could produce security on the ground, not merely announce it.

Regional Instability and Contested Peace

Sustain Hope entered a region already unsettled by the Russian Civil War and competing claims over territory and military power. Ukraine had never been wholly comfortable as one of the Union’s largest and most productive republics, and ethnic Ukrainians were distinct from Russians despite outsiders’ tendency to conflate them. As Russia’s civil conflict continued, Ukrainians sought to strengthen their position, particularly in Crimea, a peninsula geographically associated with Ukraine and connected to the Russian Federation across the strait to the east.

The dispute between Kyiv and Moscow over Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet remained unresolved. With Russia consumed by civil war, Ukraine appeared poised to settle the issue. This conflict was not the stated object of Sustain Hope, whose immediate mission concerned Georgia, but it shaped the surrounding crisis in which the intervention had to operate. A peacekeeping presence meant to stabilize one part of the region could not make neighboring territorial contests disappear.

The language of peace itself was disputed. When a proposed intervention was defended as necessary to maintain peace, Admiral Scott challenged the premise: “What peace, Madam Secretary? The whole area is tearing itself apart now.” His objection exposes the gap between the operation’s diplomatic rationale and the disorder on which that rationale rested. Sustain Hope was authorized in the name of peace, but the region’s fragmentation made peace both the mission’s goal and a contested description of present conditions.

Supply, Exposure, and Continuing Constraints

The Thomas Jefferson battle group’s dependence on resupply was a structural weakness from the outset. A modern carrier required replenishment of expendables at sea every two to three weeks. The carrier was nuclear-powered and did not need fuel for its own propulsion, but its aircraft consumed aviation fuel. Under ordinary conditions, the aircraft’s supply would last no more than ten days, and less under a heavy flying schedule, a major strike, or an extended running battle. The group’s only sources of resupply were the UN replenishment tankers that followed it.

Those figures gave the mission a hard operational clock. A force sent to secure relief access and enforce airspace restrictions could not treat sorties as unlimited: sustained flying consumed the fuel on which enforcement depended. Nor could the carrier’s nuclear propulsion solve the problem, because the aircraft—not the ship’s engines—were the critical consumers. The distinction between a nuclear-powered hull and a fuel-hungry air wing made the group’s apparent endurance misleading.

That dependence became more dangerous when the Bosporus was closed and the battle group was effectively trapped in the Black Sea. Round-the-clock flying cut the already limited ten-day margin to two to four days at most. Beyond that, the carrier and its escorts risked becoming, in the book’s stark formulation, useless vessels confined by the straits. At a later planning meeting, Admiral Scott and Magruder addressed whether the group could be reached and resupplied; Magruder distributed estimates to the officials at the table. The question had shifted from how to conduct the mission to whether the force could continue at all.

A later fuel effort shows the scale of the logistical remedy required. After aviation gasoline at Arsincevo was judged suitable for the Jefferson’s standards, the remaining task was to pump nearly three million gallons—about nine thousand tons—aboard. Flight-deck operations were suspended during the transfer, making the solution itself a temporary limit on aviation activity. Sustain Hope’s strategic promise therefore rested not only on ships, aircraft, and authorization, but on access to fuel, tankers, ports, and passage through the straits. Its humanitarian and peacekeeping purpose could not be separated from the material conditions that kept its force operational.