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Times Online
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The face-off was the most serious such incident since the Revolutionary Guard’s seizure of eight Royal Navy sailors and seven Marines from the HMS Cornwall last March in the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the Gulf. Iran claimed that the 15 had strayed into Iranian waters, which Britain denied. But an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman dismissed it is a routine incident. “This is an ordinary occurrence which happens every now and then for both sides,” he told the IRNA news agency.
I wasn’t there, and I don’t want to judge prematurely, but until the details come out, I would just like people to remember the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
BBC America covered this story very well last night.
It sounds to me that the Revolutionary Guard may be going off on their on every once in a while.
The best way to dismiss your government news on this subject is to learn Farsi. What are you waiting for?
sky news just released the video. Given the Yemen incident, I’d be nervous about speedboats running 40+ knots nearby too.
Remember the USS Cole. Small Craft packed full of explosives are a very real threat.
They had no chance!!!!!!11
Phalanx is a point-defense, total-weapon system consisting of two 20mm gun mounts that provide a terminal defense against incoming air targets. CIWS, without assistance from other shipboard systems, will automatically engage incoming anti-ship missiles and high-speed, low-level aircraft that have penetrated the ship primary defense envelope. As a unitized system, CIWS automatically performs search, detecting, tracking, threat evaluation, firing, and kill assessments of targets while providing for manual override. Each gun mount houses a fire control assembly and a gun subsystem. The fire control assembly is composed of a search radar for surveillance and detection of hostile targets and a track radar for aiming the gun while tracking a target. The unique closed-loop fire control system that tracks both the incoming target and the stream of outgoing projectiles (by monitoring their incoming noise signature) gives CIWS the capability to correct its aim to hit fast-moving targets, including ASMs.
The gun subsystem employs a gatling gun consisting of a rotating cluster of six barrels. The gatling gun fires a 20mm subcaliber sabot projectile using a heavy-metal (either tungsten or depleted uranium) 15mm penetrator surrounded by a plastic sabot and a light-weight metal pusher. The gatling gun fires 20mm ammunition at either 3,000 or 4,500 rounds-per-minute with a burst length of continuous, 60, or 100 rounds.
Now I’m not an expert at geography, but I do believe the Strait of Hormuz is a LOT closer to Iran than it is to the United States.
One has to wonder if Iran was parking capital warships a few miles off the USA coast, would we send only a speedboat to check them out?
The US Command of the 5th fleet is backing down from their stance on that the threat came from Iran… will this get any media attention in the US?
Heck, let our U.S. Navy sink their speedboats! We are ones with the Phalanx system.