Yeah, no war has ever been started over a sunken ship.
Misuse of Occam. Simple fact: one should reach puberty before attempting to use a razor.
If Iran claimed to do such a attack after saying they would close the straights that would be Occam. But as it stands the simplest explanation with fewest assumptions is the aggressor is the US, thus the source of the attacks is the US.
…the simplest explanation, with the fewest assumptions, is that the United States is sinking vessels belonging to Norway and Taiwan, which are both American-friendly nations?
That’s like saying that the simplest explanation is that the Moon landing was staged or that 9/11 was an inside job.
Would deploying US mine sweepers be an option to keep the shipping lanes open?
IIRC we’ve done that in the past?
Oh, did one of 'em sink?
Oh, did they both sink?
The Secretary of State delivering an address from State Department briefing room isn’t a Pentagon press briefing. DOD’s not Dept of State.
…and an interesting look at what the Pentagon’s media strategy has been under Mattis and now Acting SECDEF Shannahan. On camera press briefings have become rare but it’s not that the Pentagon has stopped talking. They haven’t. They mostly stopped talking on camera. It’s a subtle difference. It takes DOD off the radar of those that get most of their news in video form, whether that’s cable news or social media attached video clips. Someone who gets most of their news by watching say Fox and Friends in the morning and is cleared for high level briefings is going to have to get their defense related news from those briefings. Those briefings will have someone there immediately available to answer questions and try to correct misconceptions before a tweet, or 12, gets fired off about the issue.
In some ways it’s a brilliant press strategy for the current leadership and political climate. The downside is most of the American public is pretty lazy and ignorant about defense issues until something big happens. DOD has dropped off their radar as well.
I’m talking less about a literal flag, and more about non-circumstantial evidence - the Gulf of Tonkin incident, conflation of an actual combat incident between a US destroyer and a flotilla of North Vietnamese motor boats with a second fictional incident contributes the “flag” of the known identity of N. Vietnamese boats in the first combat incident with the “false flag” of the second incident to achieve apportionment of blame to the North Vietnamese. In the same vein, in the Gleiwitz Incident, German prisoners were dressed in Polish uniforms to produce a “flag” of Poland when the actual perpetrators were the Nazis.
In this instance, there’s an accusation of Iranian involvement, but to my mind, for it to be a false flag incident, there needs to be some evidence to provide the “flag,” an accusation is just an accusation, not an entire operation.
I’m not saying your use of the term “false flag” is wrong - I’m just saying that I’m using the term a little differently than how you’re using it.
More importantly, there’s not only 3 possibilities (Iran, US, Saudi Arabia) of who might be responsible for the attacks - what about Houthis from Yemen? Al-qaeda? Daesh/ISIS? Hezbollah? The Mahdi Army? Some Libyan group? I’m just throwing out names - the point is that access to limpet mines and boats are not limited to the nation-states of the region, and it’s better if we reserve judgement on what happened until more evidence comes to light.
If limpet mines were used, minesweepers might not help - limpet mines can be attached physically to the hull of a ship directly or using a remotely operated vehicle, rather than just being seeded over a space of ocean, waiting for a ship to come along. Better security in ports and along the sea lanes might be more important than minesweepers.
We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
The Tanker War phase of the Iran-Iraq War saw both adversaries attacking oil supply lines to include shipping. The US was involved in several ways. We reflagged tankers as American to legally allow us to provide direct support. The US Navy then instituted aggressive patrolling and convoy escort to protect those “American” tankers. Almost all shipping through the Gulf became nominally American in that phase.
When Iran mined the shipping lanes we did include de-mining operations as part of the package to ensure freedom of navigation. Then one of those mines heavily damaged, alnd almost sank, a US warship killing ten US sailors. Our response was to fight what is still the largest post-WWII US naval surface action against Iran. We started with relatively limited retaliatory strikes against several former oil platforms that were being used as command posts. The Iranian navy defended them escalating the fight.
Putting US ships in harms way to conduct even defensive operations comes with risks and potential pressures to escalate. Mine sweepers would need to be protected against some of the other threats. A US warship could be lost. Iranian military surface or air assets could be fired upon in murky self defense situations. We might even truly screw up and down an Iranian civilian airliner killing everyone on board. It’s not like that would be a first.
Minesweepers may be a good idea depending on what the threat actually turns out to be. Every military operation comes with risks, though. Those risks include the chaos at the tactical point of execution producing strategic effects. If we remember those risks when making the initial decisions there’s less chance to be surprised and see the mission change into something we never envisioned.
Here’s some more info from a UAE statement about last month’s attack (not today’s):
I’m a bit curious as to their conclusion that the targets were “premeditated” and “pre-selected”.
This post is distilled insanity
Distilled? :dubious:
Well, I went outside and looked around. No large fires. Did anything happen overnight?
CENTCOM released pictures and video of the purported limpet mines, and an Iranian patrol boat removing an unexploded one from the hull of Kokura Courageous:
https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/1139344244924194816/photo/1
Interesting. I don’t think it’s conclusive, though.
The video may or may not be significant. It was taken nine or ten hours after the attacks, and purportedly shows people on an Iranian boat removing an unexploded limpet mine from one of the damaged tankers. However, the Iranians could, I’m speculating, potentially have taken the limpet mine for their own investigations into the matter.
The other bit of evidence is the part in the described CENTCOM timeline 1-2 hours after the attacks, as the USS Bainbridge moved towards the tankers, who had issued distress calls:
However, the Iranians would also have been answering the distress calls and sending ships out. Indeed, the timeline says that at 9:12 a.m. the U.S. aircraft observed the Iranian boats pulling a raft from the attacked tanker out of the water, and they also took one crew that had been rescued by another ship onto their boats.
So I still don’t see the evidence provided as passing the bar of proof “beyond reasonable doubt.”
I agree, but it’s more evidence against Iran than we had before. If there’s an innocent explanation for why they were pulling the purported mine off the hull of the damaged tanker, it would behoove Iran to speak up and share with the international community what they were doing / thinking.
Let’s hypothesize that the Iranians are innocent. Why would they not take the mine that’s attached to an abandoned tanker next to their coastal waters? Maybe there’s a safety aspect to having a primed bomb on a drifting crewless ship, or maybe there could be identifying information to be gleaned from the limpet mine, such as serial numbers etc.
The “Occam’s razor” explanation for pulling mines of a damaged freighter is indeed “innocent”. Not doing so (if they’re aware of them and they have the freighter in their custody) would be far more suspicious.