Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Iran's New Threat

John Burtis discusses the new Iranian missiles (and mentions this blog!) is his latest article:

...the New Wars blog-site carries a story on how to sink a carrier, which surfaced courtesy of a naïve US Naval officer who let the whole thing slip to a Chinese counterpart during a good will visit. Sometime later the Chinese were seen busily buying wake-following Russian torpedoes. The Iranians will not be too far behind in this technology and the Hoot may be their weapon of choice.

And with some important history:

Napoleon spoke of a whiff of grapeshot to break up a Parisian mob, while the Japanese spoke of the need for just a brush of the mailed sleeve to eject the Americans from Guadalcanal. Napoleon was right, the Japanese were wrong — how will the dice bounce for the Revolutionary Guards and the United States?
Remember that we were the underdogs at Guadalcanal. That we defeated a superior, battle tested and more technically advanced — for 1942 — foe. And imagine if we enter this conflict and quit the seas in defeat after the loss of a few capital ships and aircraft, including an aircraft carrier.


The loss of one carrier with some 6000 crewmen would be more devastating than the entire battleline attacked at Pearl Harbor, where we lost less than 3000 sailors. We can only hope our leaders won't shrug off this latest threat to our big ships on the high seas.