Task Force 74 was a task force assembled from the Seventh Fleet of the United States Navy that was deployed to the Bay of Bengal by the Nixon administration in December 1971, at the height of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. Led by the USS Enterprise, the deployment of the task force was seen as a show of force by the United States in support of beleaguered West Pakistani forces at a time when the Indian military was closing in on Dacca, the capital of what was then East Pakistan, during the Bangladesh Liberation War. While the United States had aimed to intimidate India into ceasing its war effort against Pakistan, the task force failed to achieve its strategic objective due to a large-scale intervention by the Soviet Union, which was actively backing Indian actions both politically and mi