The North Sea action
The North Sea action of 18 February 2026 was the largest naval surface engagement between Western powers in eight decades. Seventy miles east of Shetland, Combined Task Group Atlantic put a coordinated low-level strike into Carrier Strike Group 8 and sank the guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg with thirty-two dead. A French frigate and, separately, a British destroyer were also lost or crippled.
The strike
For forty-eight hours the two forces had traded long-range salvos under heavy emission control in gale-force Arctic weather. The allied task group, reading land-based radar feeds from Norway and the Faeroes, vectored a mixed flight of sixteen French Rafale M and Royal Navy maritime strike aircraft into a saturation salvo of twenty-four Exocet MM40 Block 3c and Storm Shadow missiles, released beneath the American radar horizon.
The Gettysburg
In the combat information centre of the Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Gettysburg, operators engaged the incoming sea-skimmers with SM-2 Block IIIC and ESSM and downed fourteen in rapid succession. Then an unexpected subsurface salvo of F21 heavyweight torpedoes from the French Suffren shattered the ship's defensive geometry. Manoeuvring to evade the torpedo spread, Gettysburg was struck amidships by two Exocets. The explosions ignited auxiliary fuel storage and severed electrical distribution to the Aegis SPY-1B arrays.
Captain Marcus Vance led three hours of damage control before catastrophic flooding forced the order to abandon ship at 07:15 GMT. The cruiser went down with thirty-two confirmed dead — the first American cruiser lost in action since 1945.
The rest of the action
Two hundred miles south, the Type 45 destroyer HMS Defender was heavily damaged by two AGM-158C missiles from American B-1Bs and was towed toward Scapa Flow. The French FREMM frigate Aquitaine was sunk by a Mk 48 torpedo from USS Indiana.
Keflavik
At 14:40 GMT the same day, eight RAF Typhoons staging from RAF Kinloss with French Mirage 2000-5 support executed a low-altitude standoff strike on Keflavik with Storm Shadow and SCALP-EG. Newly deployed Patriot batteries intercepted nine weapons; five got through. The primary aviation fuel tank farm was destroyed and the 10,000-foot runway re-cratered, suspending heavy C-17 flights from the continental United States and forcing American fighters in Greenland onto strict fuel rationing.
Nine days after it was taken by assault, the airfield Northern Hinge had been fought for could not support the campaign it was taken to support.