Iranian aggressors act aggressive to USN

[Patroklos]

I will just quote myself from a, ummm, far inferior board I sometimes frequent.

Alright guys, here we go

It is ENTIRELY plausible that the transmission was from another source. For routine communications between surface vessels, civilian or military, a VHF radio called a "bridge to bridge" is used. It can be as small as a handheld radio with a 1-2 mile range or a large base station with 30-40 mile range. All vessels over a certain length are required to have them by international law.

Now a BtoB transimission can be heard by everyone in range with a BtoB, as long as you are monitoring the right channels and there are designated channels depending on who you are and what you are doing (for instance in US INLAND waters everyone should use channel 16). It is designed to be heard by everyone in case you are in trouble or need to talk about manuevering to avoid a collision. Things like weather and tide information are sometimes broadcasted by helpful port authorites over designated channels as well. So basically anyone in the area, to include civilian merchants which can be seen in the videos, could monitor and talk into the conversation. Merchant mariners are a wierd lot, a crew of dirt poor Filipino and Indian merchantmen who have been at sea for a year have a quirky sense of humor.

That being said, when a merchant is in the straights of Hormuz they are just as concerned with Iranian piracy/antics as the USN is. The master would have been on the bridge and they are highly paid professionals who of all things don't want any trouble on their trade routes. The idea of a tanker Captain making such a transmission or letting seaman timmy do it is not plausible.

What is plausible is that one of a hundred odd cheap, dirty, wooden fishing/trading dhows that are ubiquitous in the Gulf did.

However, if that was the case then the Iranians would have heard it too and I didn't hear any of them trying to make it clear to the USN that it was NOT them saying those things. Note you don't hear that warning on the Iranian tape, which if it had been made by a third party you would have heard on the speedboats BtoB as well (and if that was the case you can bet Iran would have made it available). And it is also possible that the threat came from an IRCGN shore station, which was undoubtedly in contact with the Iranian speed boats the whole time.

It is all irrelevant anyway, the movement of the boats was far more than enough to warrent deadly force.

Note: USN warships are numbered within their class, not by the total number of hulls in the force. So you can have a cruiser and a carrier and a frigate all with the same number. The hull number for the USS Port Royal is 73, and there is not a "USS" on the side of the ship.

Because of course the US Navy lacks the ability to triangulate a radio signal to see where it's source is. Because their ships are still propelled with oars. Pull boys pull.

The world is not a video game, in real life complicated technical feats are not as easy as pressing "B."

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Patroklos
I should point out that there is a concern now that the threat by the Iranians might have actually come from a third party, probably a fishing dhow but maybe a tanker, in the are with a rather morbid sense of humor.

This is ENTIRELY possible.

I don't know why it took so long for them to think of that, though, under the circumstances, and with the example of the Cole? drilled in to me, my most immediate concern would be the little boats zooming around, despite the fact that Iran hasn't really done any of its own suicide bombings (Iran will fight to the last Arab).

Frankly, this incident really isn't all that news worthy, given that similar incidents like this happen all the time, just like when the U.S. sends spy planes cruising off China and the Chinese send fighters out to watch, etc. This smacks more of the Administration trying to shore up support for an assault on Iran, which was seriously undermined by the NIE. Gulf of Tonkin, Battleship Maine and all that. Most of our wars were either started because our navy was attacked or because we claim our navy was attacked.

[Patroklos]

Frankly, this incident really isn't all that news worthy, given that similar incidents like this happen all the time

I have never seen/heard of an incident quite like this one as far as the charging and the close ranges and objects and all. The Iranians really did go overboard this time.

[DinoDoc]

This smacks more of the Administration trying to shore up support for an assault on Iran, which was seriously undermined by the NIE.

If that were the case and this event never happened as you suggest, why not add a bit to the "fake" video with the Navy heroically blowing them out of the water? Make for much better entertainment than Navy personel warning people seconds away from you that 1 more step will be thier last after letting them get that close in the first place.

[chequita guevara]

Because I doubt the Navy is under orders to be on the lookout for an event that could be used as a pretext for war and then up the ante. Given that the Navy "vetoed" sending a 3rd carrier group to the Gulf a year ago, I highly doubt they'd have gone along with such a plan.

I find it much more likely, that as with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Administration is taking a non-event and trying to blow it up into something that might generate support among Americans for a third war.

[chequita guevara]

Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel
by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to U.S. ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a "battle at sea," new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no U.S. commander was on the verge of firing at the Iranian boats.

The new information that appears to contradict the original version of the incident includes the revelation that U.S. officials spliced the audio recording of an alleged Iranian threat onto to a videotape of the incident. That suggests that the threatening message may not have come in immediately after the initial warning to Iranian boats from a U.S. warship, as appears to do on the video.

Also unraveling the story is testimony from a former U.S. naval officer that non-official chatter is common on the channel used to communicate with the Iranian boats and testimony from the commander of the U.S. 5th fleet that the commanding officers of the U.S. warships involved in the incident never felt the need to warn the Iranians of a possible use of force against them.

Further undermining the U.S. version of the incident is a video released by Iran Thursday showing an Iranian naval officer on a small boat hailing one of three ships.

The Iranian commander is heard to say, "Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat." He then requests the "side numbers" of the U.S. warships. A voice with a U.S. accent replies, "This is coalition warship 73. I am operating in international waters."

The dramatic version of the incident reported by U.S. news media throughout Tuesday and Wednesday suggested that Iranian speedboats, apparently belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard navy, had made moves to attack three U.S. warships entering the Strait and that the U.S. commander had been on the verge of firing at them when they broke off.

Typical of the network coverage was a story by ABC's Jonathan Karl quoting a Pentagon official as saying the Iranian boats "were a heartbeat from being blown up."

Bush administration officials seized on the incident to advance the portrayal of Iran as a threat and to strike a more threatening stance toward Iran. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley declared Wednesday that the incident "almost involved an exchange of fire between our forces and Iranian forces." President George W. Bush declared during his Mideast trip Wednesday that there would be "serious consequences" if Iran attacked U.S. ships and repeated his assertion that Iran is "a threat to world peace."

Central to the depiction of the incident as involving a threat to U.S. warships is a mysterious pair of messages that the sailor who heard them onboard immediately interpreted as saying, "I am coming at you…," and "You will explode after a few minutes." But the voice in the audio clearly said "I am coming to you," and the second message was much less clear.

Furthermore, as the New York Times noted Thursday, the recording carries no ambient noise, such as the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind, which should have been audible if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small Iranian boats.

A veteran U.S. naval officer who had served as a surface warfare officer aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Gulf sent a message to the New York Times on-line column "The Lede" Wednesday pointing out that in the Persian Gulf, the "bridge-to-bridge" radio channel used to communicate between ships "is like a bad CB radio" with many people using it for "hurling racial slurs" and "threats." The former officer wrote that his "first thought" was that the message "might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft."

Pentagon officials admitted to the Times that they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from another source.

The five Iran boats involved were hardly in a position to harm the three U.S. warships. Although Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman described the Iranian boats as "highly maneuverable patrol craft" that were "visibly armed," he failed to note that these are tiny boats carrying only a two- or three-man crew and that they are normally armed only with machine guns that could do only surface damage to a U.S. ship.

The only boat that was close enough to be visible to the U.S. ships was unarmed, as an enlarged photo of the boat from the navy video clearly shows.

The U.S. warships were not concerned about the possibility that the Iranian boats were armed with heavier weapons capable of doing serious damage. Asked by a reporter whether any of the vessels had anti-ship missiles or torpedoes, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, Commander of the 5th Fleet, answered that none of them had either of those two weapons.

"I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats," said Cosgriff.

The edited Navy video shows a crewman issuing an initial warning to approaching boats, but the footage of the boats maneuvering provides no visual evidence of Iranian boats "making a run on U.S. ships" as claimed by CBS news Wednesday in its report based on the new video.
Vice Adm. Cosgriff also failed to claim any run toward the U.S. ships following the initial warning. Cosgriff suggested that the Iranian boat's manoeuvres were "unduly provocative" only because of the "aggregate of their manoeuvres, the radio call and the dropping of objects in the water."

He described the objects dropped by the Iranian boat as being "white, box-like objects that floated." That description indicates that the objects were clearly not mines, which would have been dark and would have sunk immediately. Cosgriff indicated that the ships merely "passed by them safely" without bothering to investigate whether they were explosives of some kind.

The apparent absence of concern on the part of the U.S. ships' commanding officers about the floating objects suggests that they recognised that the Iranians were engaging in a symbolic gesture having to do with laying mines.

Cosgriff's answers to reporters' questions indicated that the story promoted earlier by Pentagon officials that one of the U.S. ships came very close to firing at the Iranian boats seriously distorted what actually happened. When Cosgriff was asked whether the crew ever gave warning to the Iranian boats that they "could come under fire," he said the commanding officers "did not believe they needed to fire warning shots."

As for the report circulated by at least one Pentagon official to the media that one of the commanders was "close to firing," Cosgriff explained that "close to" meant that the commander was "working through a series of procedures". He added, "[I]n his mind, he might have been closing in on that point."

Despite Cosgriff's account, which contradicted earlier Pentagon portrayals of the incident as a confrontation, not a single news outlet modified its earlier characterisation of the incident. After the Cosgriff briefing, Associated Press carried a story that said, "U.S. forces were taking steps toward firing on the Iranians to defend themselves, said the U.S. naval commander in the region. But the boats—believed to be from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's navy—turned and moved away, officials said."

That was quite different from what Cosgriff actually said.
In its story covering the Cosgriff briefing, Reuters cited "other Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity" as saying that "a U.S. captain was in the process of ordering sailors to open fire when the Iranian boats moved away"—a story that Cosgriff had specifically denied.

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by dannubis


You don't.

However, looking back on your little unilateral adventure in Iraq I would say it would be best (even for your own sake) that you did.

NO. It's safe to say that seeking UN resolutions to condone each US naval deployment would be very stupid and self defeating.

[Patroklos]

How does anything in that article "unravel" the USN's story?

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by Patroklos
How does anything in that article "unravel" the USN's story?

Also unraveling the story is testimony from a former U.S. naval officer that non-official chatter is common on the channel used to communicate with the Iranian boats and testimony from the commander of the U.S. 5th fleet that the commanding officers of the U.S. warships involved in the incident never felt the need to warn the Iranians of a possible use of force against them.

Every Single Force Protection Drill I've been in involves the FPO on the bridge loudspeaking saying "Red Vessel! You are within x meters of a US Warships, turn around or prepare to be fired upon!"

[Patroklos]

Then you should know full well that there are differneces between queries and warnings, and the of the three levels ofwarnings the one that includes the use of force is the last one in the series.

You should also know that like the force continuum, if the situation was already escalated past the lower levels due to either the seriousness of the threat when discovered or the speed at which the situation developes you don't have to use them, you just skip the appropirate one.

Watching the video again, you actually hear the RTARPA watchstander issue and then report a level one.

"Red Vessel! You are within x meters of a US Warships, turn around or prepare to be fired upon!"

I hope that was a paraphrase, becasue I would laugh at and call a dork any FPO that said that in a drill.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Patroklos
I should point out that there is a concern now that the threat by the Iranians might have actually come from a third party, probably a fishing dhow but maybe a tanker, in the are with a rather morbid sense of humor.

This is ENTIRELY possible.

Didn't I say that before? The dude sounded like he was putting on a voice.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Lonestar

Every Single Force Protection Drill I've been in involves the FPO on the bridge loudspeaking saying "Red Vessel! You are within x meters of a US Warships, turn around or prepare to be fired upon!"

What if they don't speak English?

I thought it was only American tourists who responded to non-English speakers by shouting more loudly in English. Are you telling me the USN does this too?

[Agathon]

A veteran U.S. naval officer who had served as a surface warfare officer aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Gulf sent a message to the New York Times on-line column "The Lede" Wednesday pointing out that in the Persian Gulf, the "bridge-to-bridge" radio channel used to communicate between ships "is like a bad CB radio" with many people using it for "hurling racial slurs" and "threats."

So it's basically a radio version of Apolyton.

[Patroklos]

Almost. Its not archived for eternity

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by Agathon


What if they don't speak English?

I thought it was only American tourists who responded to non-English speakers by shouting more loudly in English. Are you telling me the USN does this too?

(1) it's on a Merchant Band. That's a bit like saying that we would be insane to use English when hailing a civilian airliner.

(2)I don't know about Pat's ship(I believe it was the Ben****up) but on mine we had L3 Titan Translators yelling it in Farsi/Arabic as well as English.