An Iranian warship destroyed in a US torpedo strike on Wednesday was “defenceless” and participating in an international naval exercise as a guest of the Indian navy, according to reports.
Former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal said “the Iranian ship will not be where it was if we had not invited it to talk [sic] part in our Milan exercise”. Sibal added that because it was taking part in an exercise “it was defenceless”.
Indian politician Supriya Shrinate said on social media: "These Iranian navy men parading at an event in India, were our guests. Invited by us.
“US submarine targeted their ship and killed them while they were returning home.” Shrinate also criticised Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his failure to make a statement on the attack.
This is all so stupid
- this is all so fucking dumb
- its… uh… a frigate. Frankly, I doubt the claim that it was unarmed. You can look up the weapon systems specs on that page trivially. It is also armed with torpedoes, and supported an ASW chopper, and so conceivably could pose a threat to a submarine if it detected one. You can see the box launchers for ASMs on the deck, for fuck’s sake.
- in a context where country A is engaging in open hostilities with country B, military vessels of the opposing side are fair game in international waters.
- in terms of picking up survivors: extremely shitty, yes, but… what is a submarine supposed to do? They’re notoriously cramped already. Not to mention, taking on a bunch of enemy survivors onto a highly classified submarine that has a somewhat smaller crew compliment than the target vessel doesn’t sound like a thing any sane sub commander would do.
Kegsbreath feeling so smug killing more unarmed and defenseless people in boats.
Wow that’s fucked up on multiple levels.
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to attack a literally defenseless warship … Could you not have, you know, boarded it instead? Forced it to surrender? Feels like at that point you can just threaten to do what you did and they would have to comply.
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if you’ve seen the released periscope footage of the attack, and realize that that explosion was fully from the torpedo and not from an ammo store blowing, it makes it look that much more like an intentional massacre. Is there really no smaller munition on board that sub that can be used to disable a defenseless target?
- Frankly I straight up do not believe it was unarmed. Why the hell would you sail a warship around without any munitions…?
- I’m guessing they didn’t want to use an antiship missile because there was other civilian traffic in the area, and you cannot control a missile from a sub once it’s fired. Mk.48 torpedoes have wire-guided capability, so you can literally steer it into your target. And no, afaik US subs do not carry any other variety of torpedo - that’s it. And they have a pretty fucking big warhead. Yes, overkill, but if they received orders to sink an enemy combatant… they’re gonna use what they got.
Please note: in no way am I attempting to be an apologist here. I’m just trying to point out that some parts of this story are not terribly believable, and that attack subs have very particular capabilities and constraints that they operate with. The order was shitty. But at the end of the day, it was an enemy vessel, and the sub’s CO got an order to sink it.
Why the hell would you sail a warship around without any munitions…?
Because they were invited to an international naval exercise that required them to be unarmed…
Yeah, no one’s arguing that whoever was ordered to push the button was ordered to push the button, the point is that it was a shitty order to give.
It’s also rich to be like “we had to attack them, we’re at war”, when you illegally and unilaterally started the war several days earlier.
If they had no intelligence of the ammunition situation (doubt) it could be risky to try to board a warship. Not that it justifies anything, just aside from piracy boarding enemy warships isn’t really a thing anymore as far as I’m aware.
If they had no intelligence of the ammunition situation (doubt) it could be risky to try to board a warship.
I mean, there’s literally no way the US didn’t know it was on the way back from an ammo-less exercise. The Indian naval exercises were very public, with 74 countries participating.
Profound incompetence seems like a possibility tbh. They absolutely should have known about it but it sure seems like they’re basically just fucking around, not taking things seriously. So I’d definitely believe that they saw an Iranian warship pull up and were like “WTF is that doing there? Kill it!”.
I don’t think that should excuse their actions, but it does seem like a believable chain of events.
Like a bunch of drunk rednecks driving around in their truck shooting at road signs.
Whos to say they didn’t pack some munitions with them anyway? Without another nation checking the ship you just have to take their word for it.
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I mean fair point, I can’t find any info on whether or not anyone verifies that the ships are unloaded or if it’s self reported. And it does seem unlikely that a nation would let another country inspect it’s warship.
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how is a ship, made for war, defenceless?
like was their Indian exercise just staring at Desi tits?
I’m not about fluffing up our shit over here, it’s aweful, but how the fuck is a ship made for war on the ocean, defenceless.
Uhhh, don’t load it with munitions?
Have a civilian crew?
Come on, I’m sure there’s a few other ways.
why and how would a civilian crew man a war ship? I’ve never heard of that unless the ship was retired? what flags were hoisted?
I served for a number of years and parades or weekends or not, we still had to pretend sadam hussein was gonna scud us.
out of the years, other than maybe dry docked, there were probably 0 times we were defenseless.
update woops forgot about the 1 time when fire cut off power I guess…
still we would have gone down with a fight.Why not? If it’s just being demoed off, why would it need a full military crew? Explain, balls in your court mate.
Also just a short few google searches brought me to This, sounds like it’s not uncommon to have civilian crews to man warships. What if it’s just being moved for service? Need to get a full military crew and load it up with munitions? Fucking lol, as if.
Just because you served, doesn’t mean you know absolutely everything about how the navy/military operates. That’s just an asinine view lmfao.
if it’s being demoed it wouldn’t be flying any flags. it wasn’t being demoed though, it supposedly just participated in an Indian exercise or were there by invite.
out of ammunition for a warship and being piloted by civilians, and just partipated in a multinational exercise?
what?
link is fine, contractors and groups are on ships all the time. not my point. point there would be if it’s piloted /commanded by civilians, it wouldn’t be considered an unarmed Iranian warship anymore. it would just be a civilian vessel.
i don’t know everything nor do I wanna know. but I know if ships are sailing waters with comms live, with markings and flags flying what the US deems adversary, especially lately, well they’re military targets.
it’s a bad move on the US though but given the shit show lately, it seems to be …on par.
By not having ammunition, just like it says in the title. Also it was returning from the exercise, so even if they had ammunition for some live fire exercise, they would’ve already used that.
Sounds like the perfect moment to attack it.
I think it’s illegal to do so without officially declaring war first but whatever international law is fake anyway
Declarations of war are effectively obsolete. It’d come down to the situation and haggling about proportionality. It was unquestionably a valid military target, and Iran’s specific threats against international shipping may have opened the door to preemptive action against their naval assets.
You gotta be a gold medalist in mental gymnastics to view the US bombings as legitimate preemptive action.
“We knew Iran would respond to our bombings, so we preempted their response to our preemptive bombing with a prepreemptive bombing.”
A torpedo, not a bomb.
