The Iran "provoked and harrassed" US American naval vessels of the Navy.

[originalpckelly]

It was later found that the Iranians had too much of Mahmoud's Hard Lemonade, which is non-alcoholic. Casualties from the encounter included four Iranian sailors with priapism.

[gratuitous]

1. Five little speedboats

I can see how we can spend billions on weapons and sailors and soldiers and destroyers and battleships and everything, and then watch as a couple dozen guys equipped with Evinrude-powered speedboats can "provoke and harrass" these multi-billion dollar boats into a suicidal attack.

[originalpckelly]

2. Ever been annoyed by a mosquito or fly?

How much bigger are you?

[gratuitous]

3. Yes, I have been

Which is why I stay out of their territory whenever possible. I also don't spend a billion dollars a day on insect repellent. What in the wide, wide world of sports are we doing policing the high seas anyway?

[NeedleCast]

4. Doesn't take much "ship" to carry a few torpedo tubes

Some of you are really misinformed about the capabilites of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard attack boats. Yeah, it's basically a big moter-boat. Doesn't mean you can't rig it out with a .50 cal machine gun or a torpedo tube or even a small guided missile package. It's not the boat that matters, it's the thing on the boat that goes BOOM! when it hits our ships. Despite the fact that this has been posted on half a dozen or so threads that this news bit has spawned, several people seem to still think that these IRG boats are "no threat to the big bad Americans." They are also vastly more manuverable than those warships that are 25 times as big as they are which makes them hard to hit with converntional ship-born weaponry. A guided missile cruiser is not ment to fight moter-boats, it's pretty much designed to make big holes in the world.

If you're an NFL linebacker and a dwarf approaches you on the street and threatens you, you might laugh...right up to the point where he pulls a gun. Then he's not a person an eight of your size anymore...he's a guy with a gun. Or, if you perfer this old axiom: It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

With me?

[gratuitous]

5. Then why . . .

Why are we floating this overpriced behemoths and spending billions if they're so vulnerable?

[NeedleCast]

6. Because you have to train crews and perform missions

And you can't do that sitting in port, and I say this as a military veteran. These warships were in international waters. They have just as much right to be there as any other ship assuming they follow the laws of the body of water they happened to be in. It's also pretty much the only way to get from the Indian ocean to the East coast unless you want to go all away around the horn of Africa, and we don't. If you build warships and put Navy people on them you have to give those men and women training and it's not easy to do that sitting in port. If you don't train them, when the poo hits the rotating fan blades, they screw up and get killed. I think you'll agree that this is bad.

All things cant be made invulnerable to all other things. With all our medicine and technology and science the human body can still be a frail machine, no? You eat right, you get your immuniztions, you avoid getting bitten by bugs carrying lyme disease and Bird Flu and whatever the hell else is floating around someetimes you still get sick a die. Our cars are safer than ever before. You have to wear a seatbelt, cars have to have airbags, car frames must meet a certain standard, etc. etc. blah blah and still sometimes people die in car wrecks. Should we stop driving cars?

Let me give you another example. During the middle ages, heavy cavalry ruled the battlefield. Knights encased in thick iron and steel suits of armor, nay invulnerable atop their heavy war horses. It cost a boatload of money (at the time) to arm and armor a knight because in their element, they ruled the battlefield. However, if a knight were knocked off his horse by a lightly armed, fast moving enemy, he became very vulnerable because, well, he was a dude in a really heavy ass iron and steel suit with some guy running around him with a spear looking for any fleshy parts to poke. Big warships are kinda like knights...they run around the ocean with all sorts of weapons that the vast majority of ships dont have, but they cant be made invulerable from everything. Same with, say, a plane. A jet fighter is pretty much just a metal fuel cannister if it's sitting on the ground. Flying jet fighters...really good at shooting down planes and dropping bombs on things. Sitting-on-the-ground jet fighters...not so much. Right?

So it's a risk vs reward sort of thing, just like pretty much everything else. Ships gotta go out in the water so the crew can train and the ships can perform various tasks around the world, some mundane, some humanitarian, some aggressive. I wish we could do away with the aggressive part.

When the tsunami hit the Indian ocean a few years back, some of our ships went scurrying over there to help out. They went through the straight, just like the ships today, to perform a humanitarian task. They should be able to do so free of aggression, don't you think?