I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that the least negative thing I could say about him is that his first name is two first names.

1. Frankly I straight up do not believe it was unarmed. Why the hell would you sail a warship around without any munitions…?
2. 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.

• 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.

Actually, yes, imo. Enemy shoot downs are something that gives an opponent a propaganda victory. Friendly fire incidents result in remedial training and discipline (and in the case of this regime, firing people, because we can’t have people learning from mistakes now, can we). It’s an expensive mistake, but an expensive mistake is very different from a legit combat loss.

…huh. It’s a… change…? I don’t expect an improvement, tbh.

I mean… it is incompetence, but it’s incompetence/process/doctrinal failure on the part of the Kuwaiti Air Force, not the USAF. Which is the only thing KegsBreath would give a shit about in this context.

It definitely saves face.

Since the pilots all seem to have been rescued successfully, the latter bit is a moot point.

It’d be interesting if some enterprising souls figured out a non-polluting, low-danger way to offline the plant for a significant amount of time. And then did it again. And again. And again. And- well, you get it.

it’s because of all the ketamine. I mean, I don’t trust me. Why would you trust me?

Yeah, but at the same time, it has WAY better performance than traditional SODIMMs. The primary technical reason laptops had RAM soldered for so long was because the transfer speed became problematic with that physical format under DDR5. LPCAMM2 removes that bandwidth constraint, and maintains user serviceability.

Heh, Ukraine be like

And that sort of crap would absolutely harm deconfliction efforts between the US and allied forces, and increase the likelihood of this sort of thing happening. So yeah, I would not be shocked to eventually learn that that played a big part here.

If I am recalling correctly, one was blue-on-blue, and one was a deck loss, where they also lost a tractor overboard.

Why do you think this is a conspiracy?

Yes, because that’s a thing that can happen in carrier ops. While uncommon, it is absolutely possible. Mistakes and equipment failures happen, and carrier ops tend to be very unforgiving.

I get being skeptical about shit the regime says, seriously, and generally speaking I’m right there with you. But you should also try to understand more about the intricacies of these sorts of things before immediately assuming it’s a cover up or whatever.

Edit: and here is my explanation of why I think the first 3 F-15s that were downed were actually blue-on-blue engagements, and not cover for something else.

Fat lot of fucking good the MiC is doing us now. They’ve always been kinda shit against asymmetric threats, tbh.

Honestly, Ukraine is going to come out of their war as one of the most important arms manufacturers and doctrine-definers of this new drone-centric age of warfare that we appear to be entering. The EU would do well to work very closely with them on that front - especially the Baltic states and Scandinavia (and, well, any country that’s been getting harassed by Russian drone swarms out of the Baltic Sea, like Poland and Germany, amongst others).

It’s possible, though I don’t think it’s likely.

Generally speaking, USAF doctrine heavily emphasizes SEAD (Supression of Enemy Air Defenses) deploying in concert and close coordination with any sort of non-stealthy strike mission, in the interest of minimizing the risk of combat losses - and by all accounts, the USAF is very fucking good at SEAD (having developed the concept - also known as “Wild Weasel” sorties - back in the Vietnam War, after USN and USAF began taking significant losses to Soviet/Vietnamese SAMs, and refining it a lot since, both in terms of tech and doctrine).

For strike planes to be caught flat-footed like that, I would expect that they were out of range of any possible Iranian SAMs, and thus were not in the mindset of constant vigilance, and moreover their SEAD support was probably not either (or had split off to land at another base altogether).

Also: if the shootdown was from a Patriot, their RWR (basically: “what radar is looking at me”) was probably saying it was a friendly radar, and the pilots may have even thought the Patriot (or similar non-Russian system) was giving them cover from something they didn’t see, and they reacted late as a result.

Thus, I do think that the blue-on-blue explanation is likely accurate - especially considering it was three F-15Es, and not just a single one-off shoot down. IMO, someone (not Iranian) was running air defense in the area and didn’t properly check their deconfliction and IFF.

Edit: actually, it appears it was probably a Kuwaiti F/A-18. And as the article points out, if the pilot used Sidewinders, there would be zero warning, as the seeker is passive. However, I’m pretty sure standard loadouts are for a pair of heat seekers and the remaining pylons loaded with AMRAAMs… so that would only explain two of them. We’ll hear more about this in the coming days, most likely.

“Another” is misleading. If this is the fourth shootdown, it would be the first that Iran actually achieved, as the first three were blue-on-blue (Kuwait shot them down in error)

My days of boycotting Ubisoft certainly are coming to a middle

Yeah so the last couple generations of their cores were supposed to be Super Awesome™, but in real world usage ended up being absolute dogs - not to mention, the lack of a system analogous to Apple’s Rosetta 2 (say what you will about Apple, but that one translation layer was an absolute godsend in terms of ironing out the vast majority of CPU architecture-related hiccups arising from the x86 -> ARM transition) kinda largely hamstrung adoption.

Let’s wait and see how this actually performs.