The Explanation Is No Longer Operative
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (16) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
"In my view this is a complete cock-up.”
Retired Royal Marine Major General Julian Thompson
Many questions have been raised in the circumstances surrounding the capture of 15 British sailors and Marines operating off the HMS Cornwall. The central question is why were the boarding party embarked on two rigid inflatable boats and sent some four miles across open water to carry out the intercept.
The reason proffered thus far is that the Cornwall could not get closer to the vessel:
The sailors and marines from HMS Cornwall were in the Gulf, working under a United Nations mandate to protect Iraq from smuggling and threats to the oil industry, when an Indian-flagged vessel came under suspicion.
It was in shallow waters and the Cornwall was unable to go alongside without grounding. A boarding party jumped into two ribbed inflatable boats, or RIBs, and set out to investigate.
Now there is every reason to doubt that this is, in fact, a true statement.
Read on.
In the briefing by the British Defence Ministry, Vice Admiral Charles Style gives the latitude/longitude to the capture of the British boarding party: 29 degrees, 50.36 minutes North; 048 degrees, 43.08 minutes East. Plotted here:
Not surprisingly it tracks fairly well with the map released by the Defence Ministry:
When one consults depth data for that location one finds that the intercepted vessel was in 50 feet of water and the HMS Cornwall was in over 60 feet. The HMS Cornwall draws 24 ft/6.4m of water.
I’m not a Navy guy so I consulted a few US Navy surface warfare officers on how much water the HMS Cornwall needed to operate. The agreed answer was deeper is better but the HMS Cornwall should have been able to operate confidently, given the navigational equipment available, in 35 feet of water.
Given that response, some official comments seem to be non-responsive or calculated to deceive:
In fact, the crew of the Cornwall were operating under United Nations rules of engagement which forbid them to shoot unless they are fired upon first. The frigate was more than four miles away and could not come to the rescue because the water was too shallow.
"Cornwall draws about five metres and in water of less than 10 metres manoeuvring a craft of that size is very difficult," a senior defence official said. "In future we should think about using minesweepers, which are smaller, instead.
We need heavier weaponry on the light craft, and we must use obscurant smoke."
Note, the “senior defence official” doesn’t say the HMS Cornwall would have been in less than 10 meters but what would happen if it were operating in that depth.
From looking at the depth data the most logical explanation is that the British have a rule against their warships going into water shallower than 50 feet because otherwise the sending of a boarding party across four miles of open sea is inexplicable.
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The Explanation Is No Longer Operative 16 Comments (0 topical, 16 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
The British Marine general I quote says it best.
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling
I was talking about had/has big steel ones. That channel he went through is called the Mendenhall Bar where the Mendenhall river and various other glacial streams empty into Gastineau Channel. The CG takes the markers out over the winter then resurveys and marks the channel every spring. It is a twisting, turning thing about eight miles long and full of constantly changing unmarked sandbars. You'd best have your "red right returning" rules down without thinking to do it at any speed on any tide. My boat draws 3.5 feet and it is a white-knuckle affair to go thru there at hull speed. He took a 92 footer thru there with the throttles to the firewall. Unfortunately, it was all to no avail; the 727 had found a cloud with a rock in it and there wasn't much to recover.
In Vino Veritas
Unless that's a hard-and-fast rule (and why wouldn't it be - after all, it only takes one little mishap amidst the rocks and shoals (or shallows) to end a captain's promising career and dreams of his own flag), then there's really no excuse for the RIBS (which sound a lot like our Zodiacs) to be four miles away -- ESPECIALLY when there are known hostiles in the area.
The lack of response to the hostage-taking is suspect, as well; fear of firing upon those who are taking your troops hostage is a far worse handcuff for military folks than is the admonishment to make sure people are hostile before shooting.
In other words, I think that your people being captured is a bit of an exception.
Every unknown cargo ship is a potential floating mine.
It explains standing off a kilometer or so. It doesn't explain 4 miles. At 1000-1500m the Iranians boats could have been taken under fire by heavy machineguns on the Cornwall and probably would never have attempted it.
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling
I know close counts in horseshoes and big bombs, but all it would have taken is a dash in and training the gun. Then you could just ask the Iranians if they felt lucky.
I'd bet your favorite drink that the bridge thought the helo had it covered, the helo thought the bridge had it covered, and, consequently, nobody had it covered.
Sounds like a catastrophic failure of a M1AI Brain.
In Vino Veritas
I read somewhere that it was 6 or 7 Iranians that first captured the Brits. Was that right? If correct have the Brits been training to much with the French? Did the Brits have any weapons and if so what kind. Why not fight back or even argue till help arrives?
... That the British warship was there for protection of the sailors sent to investigate the cargo of the unknown ship. I also assume that the 5" deck gun was on the British ship's deck for the same reason. When the small Iranian vessels were sighted closing with the boarding party, a few across their bows would have waved them off, or the next rounds sink the vessels.
Isn't that why the armed British ship was there, protection?
I used to be an active duty ship driver in the Navy. (Still in the reserves). After spending most of last year as a 5th fleet staff weenie in Bahrain and spending lots of time looking at the charts of that region I'd like to add the following.
There are 2 Iraqi oil platforms in that area. I've been told that 90% of Iraq's national income passes through those platforms. Protecting the platforms is a high priority mission for coalition navy ships in the area. Chances are, the Cornwall was assigned to OPLAT guard duty and they were going to search the vessel before allowing it to transit through the OPLAT area
One of the Iraqi platforms is about 2 miles from the edge of Iranian Territorial waters - I'm being vague on purpose.
However, it is about 30 miles from the Iraqi shore. Why? The water is that area is shallow for a long way out and the platforms have to be that far away to allow the tankers to tie up. Granted, a supertanker needs a lot more water than a frigate, but the Cornwall was in much shallower water than the OPLATS.
There are two waterways spilling into the Gulf near the Cornwall. What happens when a river flows into the ocean?
Sandbars.
Sandbars move with time.
Those waters haven't been accurately charted in 20+ years. No sane captain in the USN or RN would go into that area in anything bigger than a patrol boat. Why? Grounding a ship is a career ender for the CO and just about everyone else on the bridge at the time.
But even worse, a grounded ship close to Iranian TTW is a sitting duck.
In March 2003, a British flotilla provided 5" naval gunfire on the Faw Peninsula, including the sister ship of the HMS Cornwall, the HMS Chatham, in the same area. The 5" gun has a range of 5 miles. The intercept was 7 miles from shore. So there were sandbars there 4 years ago and that squadron went within 3-4 miles of the shore.
I also challenge your assertion that the area hasn't been mapped in 20 years. I know for a fact that isn't true unless we are talking about definitions of "accurately."
The HMS Cornwall was the flagship of Commodore Nick Lambert, that flotilla was composed of USS Howard (DDG 83), USS Chinook (PC 9), USS Whirlwind (PC 11), USCGC Maui (WPB 1307), USCGC Monomoy (WPH 1326), Australian HMAS Warramunga (FFG 152).
I don't know what the mission of the Cornwall was, but it wasn't acting alone. And I think it unusual for a flagship to have a stationery protection mission and the location of those terminals is not only visible with Google Earth but mapped and available on the internet.
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling
If the water was so shallow, how come the merchant vessel being inspected was able to go there?
Actually this isn't a difficult question to answer. There's a dredged shipping channel leading from the Persian Gulf to the Iraqi port at Umm Qasr. It passes through an area called the Kha Ab Allah, which is essentially the estuary of the Shatt al'Arab. The whole area is subject to heavy silt deposition and had to be extensively dredged following the 2003 war to make it reliably usable.
But there's an even more problematic factor which I haven't seen mentioned here yet - the waters off al-Faw are littered with obstructions, many of them wrecked ships and boats from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. There are also mines. Following the 2003 war, the Royal Navy was involved in clearing the shipping channel for a length of 77 km, but it's obviously not practical to clear the whole of the Kha Ab Allah. Large vessels have to be very careful when they operate there - there's too much danger of running into a mine, stranding or striking an obstruction.
The same conditions apply on the Iranian side. That's why the Iranians were only using Boghammars and we (the Brits) were using RIBs - because only shallow-draft vessels can safely operate across the entire Kha Ab Allah. Cornwall couldn't have charged to the rescue of its sailors simply because that would have put the safety of the entire crew and the ship at extreme risk.
Again a group of three Royal Navy frigates delivered 5" gunfire onto the Faw Peninsula, pre-dredging, in 2003 to support British forces there. The operated inshore from the area of the capture.
I don't know why four years later these same waters would be so hazardous that a frigate couldn't move through them.
The HMS Cornwall isn't "large" by any standard.
No one is claiming the HMS Cornwall could have "charged to the rescue." What is being said is that there was adequate depth for a frigate to travel in and if it had closed with a mile and a half or two miles of the intercept then there would have been no need to even think about charging to the rescue.
The larger point is that the area is demonstrably not "too shallow" for the HMS Cornwall to operate. They can say we didn't want to bring our ship into less than x feet of water but they can't say the water was too shallow. It simply isn't the case.
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling
Richard North at EUReferendum has an interesting post about this, it includes some of the U.S. assets that were on station that the could have been sent to watch over the boarding party. It's a good read.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2007/04/mysteries-grow.html
the other day, Streiff, my money is still on either loss of situational awareness or inability to get a clearance to act because of the ROE, and I still lean towards lack of situational awareness. There's just too many questions starting with why was the Lynx sent out w/o sufficient fuel to allow adequate loiter time? And even if they couldn't fire unless fired upon, a warship is d***ed intimidating and a dash towards the site would have seemed in order. I'm sure there might be some recommended rule about minimum depth, but that Captain had a boarding party in danger. If the thing draws 25 feet, you take it to 26, maybe less. For years here on low tides you could see the gouges in the bottom in Gastineau Channel from when the Captain of the local USCG Cutter ran it through the sandbars to cut an hour off getting to the site of a B727 crash to search for survivors in 1971. You can fix a ship's screws. He got a medal for his efforts; maybe the Brits think differently.
In Vino Veritas