Guys,
Originally posted by Edbert
Then it remains to be answered why the brass allowed or sent them into the mission of boarding that merchant vessel without appropriate weapons to complete the mission. A second, related but even more important question is why were those men sent on a mission AND an incursion by Iranian paramilitary forces (particularly one sufficient in strenght and firepower to overwhelm the boarding party) allowed to infiltrate the perimiter and overwhelm the Marines?
FWIW all I saw on the video was some revolutionary guardsmen in small boats, has the Royal Navy nothing at their disposal to compete with that, and if so why were they not used to protect their servicemen and prevent the Iranians from attacking?
This is getting out of hand, here is the situation.
The Royal Navy patrols Iraqi waters and boards countless small boats and ships entering Iraqi waters every day. Most of these are small Dhows trading with Iraq and Kuwait, amongst them are a goodly number of smugglers bringing in arms and explosives from Iran to the Shi 'ia militia in Southern Iraq. The Iranians have had standing gunboat patrols on their side of the line since before the conflict, and now "monitor" all coalition traffic in the area to make sure they don't violate Iranian sovereignty.
The standard procedure is for larger RN vessels like the Cornwall to stop the Dhows and then send in a boarding party in inflatable boats (RIBs). The waters are too shallow for the larger vessels to get really close to shore in any event. These boarding parties consist of a mix of lightly armed sailors and marines. There is also usually a female sailor in the party in case they need to search or question Muslim women. Usually a helicopter monitors the situation until the boarding party reports that the vessel is not hostile and not smuggling at which time it withdraws and the boarding party clears the ship to continue. They then climb back in their RIBs and return to the ship.
In this case, the Cornwall stopped an Indian Dhow, the boarding party, monitored by the ships helo went aboard, nothing unusual was detected, the boarding party cleared the Dhow, and reported they were returning to their RIBs. The Helo left station and the Boarding party began climbing back into their boats. However, as soon as the report was given and the Helo left its station, Iranian gunboats left their station and travelled at 40 knots to the Dhow arriving 3 minutes later as the boarding party was entering their boats. Given that they had heavy machine guns and AA cannons trained on them by Iranian sailors and were in the process of getting into inflatables (and possibly because they had a girly with them) the Boarding Party commander decided that discretion was the better part of valor and ordered the party to surrender. Given that they would have been cut to ribbons in seconds had they resisted and immediately started Gulf War III this was probably the right decision.
Did everyone get sloppy because this happened in the middle of several years of daily SOP without any warning? Absolutely. Does it point out that with Iran in the mix there is no such thing as "normal relations?" Yes.
Given that Brits are currently being killed by Iranian manufactured EFPs, acting like they are can be trusted at all is extremely silly. But to maintain that the Marines and Sailors committed some sort of breach of military ettiquette by not dying valiantly but senselessly and forcing a war with Iran is a bit over the top.
