According to information published by the French Navy on October 12, 2021, the Horizon-class frigate Chevalier Paul sails for the Indian Ocean as part of Europe's Operation AGENOR.
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Horizon-class frigate Chevalier Paul (Picture source: French Navy)
Chevalier Paul is a Horizon-class frigate of the French Marine Nationale commissioned in June 2009, the third vessel of the French Navy named after the 17th-century admiral Chevalier Paul.
The main mission of this type of ship is the escort and protection of a carrier strike group formed around an aircraft carrier, usually the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle or one of the aircraft carriers of the US Navy, or an amphibious operation carried out by amphibious helicopter carriers. The ship's specialty is air traffic control in a war zone, but it can be employed in a wide variety of missions, such as intelligence-gathering, special forces operations, or protecting less well-armed vessels.
In service since the end of 2011, it bears the visual code D621. Its namesake is Jean-Paul de Saumeur, better known as Chevalier Paul, a French naval officer born in Marseille in 1598.
The Horizon class is a class of air-defence destroyers in service with the French Navy and the Italian Navy, designated as destroyers using NATO classification. The program started as the Common New Generation Frigate (CNGF), a multi-national collaboration to produce a new generation of air-defense frigates. In Italy, the class is known as the Orizzonte class, which translates to "horizon" in French and English.
