It’s sort of like the Chinese…they do the same thing. You hit the nail on the head there…neither country has a naval tradition (well, the recent incarnations of both countries don’t, even if historically they both did), so the Army is the primary arm. As to political power in Iran, that’s a bit more murky, but certainly the military plays a key role and has quite a bit of political power in Iran (and China to for that matter).
-XT
I prefer episodes of “Modern Family” instead…for more effect.
Really, any responses like this totally miss the point. Iran isn’t going to waste their two most modern light frigates, the heaviest vessels in their inventory, to sink a few merchant ships. The ONLY possible result of that is the following:
- One OHPerry-class U.S. Frigate sinks both of them with one hand tied behind its back.
- The US, and anyone else whose shipping was hit/endangered, bombs Iran into a uniform paste-like consistency.
I think it only fair that this guy sick them. 
We could use our fantastic teleport technology from the Philadelphia Experiment to counteract their magical torpedoes, if it comes to that. Plus, we have Batboy…let’s see the Iranian’s counter THAT!!! :eek:
If needs be, we could always fall back on the Aliens Gambit(aar)…
-XT
I hope for their sake the Iranians sail better than I post.
As I tried to post earlier, I think it only fair that this guy sink them.
If we’re going for symbolic value, I’d send this guy. Probably still has a bit of a grudge.
Let’s look at this scenario for a moment. Iran detonates a nuclear weapon out at sea along the East Coast. Nobody dies. It does $10 trillion dollars of economic damage. They surrender. The religious council apologies profusely for their raving lunatic of a President. They turn The crazy man over to our legal system. He declares himself the 12th Imam who has come back to avenge the evil US and Israel. Can’t be more crazy than that.
From our position we can’t punish an entire nation because of a crazy man. To radicals who believe in his cause he has brought a giant to it’s knees and it’s a sign of the prophesy and becomes a great recruiting tool.
A conventional nuclear weapon is a fission bomb which is the first step in developing the technology. it is also more useful than a hydrogen enhanced bomb for the purposes of an EMP weapon.
such a weapon does not require a sophisticated ballistic delivery system. It only has to go up.
You know, every time I’m reminded this boat exists, I shake my head at the idea somebody named such a beautiful baby after such a goofy looking bloke.
[QUOTE=Sailboat]
There’s some thought that Iran has a supercavitating torpedo reverse-engineered from a Russian version. That might pose some threat to US naval vessels, because of the extreme speed of engagement, and certainly would be able to harm merchant shipping.
[/QUOTE]
On the assumption that it’s a straight copy of the Shkval: not really, or rather not particularly more than surplus Soviet stuff from the 80s.
For one thing, it’s a sub weapon (or rather, among the Iranian Navy roster, only their subs have the required torp tube size)- if they’re sending ships rather than boats, it’s a non-issue.
For another, conventional torpedoes are 100% better than the Shkval for all but one purpose: counter-firing at submarines that shot first.
The idea is that when a sub fires, it briefly gives away its position (or at least its bearing from you, if you don’t have a buddy around to help triangulate), which gives you a short window to fire straight at him before he can move very far from the firing point. While his torp moves at ~50 knots, yours clips at over 200. Therefore if all goes to plan you kill him before he can kill you, which also kills the wire-guidance of his torpedo to make it easier to dodge.
Other than that, the Shkval pretty much sucks. It has 1/4th the range of a regular torp, doesn’t home, cannot change course at all after it’s been fired, has a rather small warhead and is noisy as hell so forget about firing it all sneaky-like. And it’s still leagues slower than a missile, so pretty useless against surface ships.
Bottomline: it’s a very, very niche knife-fight weapon. Apparently the Russians have improved upon it further (didn’t know that), but then I doubt they sold Iran their cutting edge stuff.
As for harming merchant ships at extreme speeds, you realize frigates have guns for that, right ? 
Or, the Iranian task force could land a small team of elite commandos on the East Coast, who could make their way to Washington, D.C., sneak into the White House using the hidden tunnels underneath the Potomac, then take the President and his family hostage and dictate whatever terms they wanted to the United States. (I saw how the could do this on a documentary on TV.)
I seem to recall they caught the Germans who tried it at that point.
Or they could charge (4) 400,000 fuel/air bombs to a visa card and use them to attack the Pentagon and a major US city causing a half trillion dollars of economic damage. I saw that on a TV documentary too.
Yes, the September 11 attacks mean ANYTHING is possible! Sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads–man, we just don’t know!
If you asked me the likelihood of the plot the day before I would have bet on the sharks with laser beams.
Before September 11, there were many fictional depictions of people using aircraft to carry out suicide attacks on buildings; “sharks with laser beams on their heads” was a deliberately absurd joke from a satirical movie.
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Iran does not have nuclear weapons.
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Even if we concede for the sake of argument that Iranian ballistic missiles have the capability of launching a nuclear warhead to the altitude needed to carry out a successful EMP attack, I know of nothing to indicate those missiles can be launched from Iranian frigates, or any other ship currently in the Iranian Navy.
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IRAN DOES NOT HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
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The “plot” discussed earlier in the thread doesn’t even make sense. They launch an attack on the United States with nuclear weapons (which, as mentioned, Iran does not possess), but we can’t do anything about it because they surrender before we can attack them?!? Oh, and they blame the whole thing on a guy which even Wikipedia knows does not control the Iranian armed forces (including Iran’s nuclear program, which has not yet produced a single nuclear detonation).
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And, finally, Iran does not have nuclear weapons.
Extremely minor cost in both, actually. You spend 1.5% of your GDP on defense, we spend 4.7%, that’s three times as much.
You’ve lost around 150 in Afghanistan, that is not militarily significant.
You’re there because at one point in time your leadership felt it was in your strategic interests to be there. Further, it wasn’t just Americans that died in 9/11. It was in the interests of most of the Western world to take a strike at al-Qaeda, and entity which we then realized was a threat to all of us, not just the United States (and they have proven that with attacks on other Western countries before and after that day.) You Canadians are ridiculous, it’s like us throwing the vast protective shield we gave you throughout the Cold War back in your face. That would be stupid of us–that shield extended over Canada because we wanted it to and it was massively to our benefit, the fact that it also benefited Canada was why Canada is part of NORAD on their side of it, but we weren’t doing it out of the goodness of our heart anymore than you guys do anything out of the goodness of your heart.
I’d hope your manpower resources are enough to have replaced a few soldiers from 9 years ago.
We were going to shoot down Russian bombers with nuclear missiles over Canada. I don’t see how they bought that.
It was a damn cool airplane, though.