Pentagon considers retaliation for attack on Mason UPDATED
David sends us a link to the news that the Defense Department is considering action against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen who perpetrated a guided missile attack on USS Mason and USS Ponce in the Red Sea the other day;
Captain Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said today that the U.S. is still assessing who fired missiles at the destroyer when it was in the Red Sea on Sunday.
“Anytime anyone engages a U.S. Navy ship at sea in hostility … they do so at great peril to themselves,” said Davis.
Asked if that could mean retaliatory strikes against those responsible for firing the missiles, Davis said, “Those things are things that we’re looking at.”
“We want very much to get to the bottom of what happened,” said Davis. “We’re going to find out who did this, and we’ll take action accordingly.”
I’m sure that those guys who fired the missiles are shaking in their boots at this point in anticipation of receiving a strongly worded letter from John Kerry promising to sail closer to shore next time.
UPDATE: It looks like MASON fired two missiles in retaliation.
After being targeted by two missile launches off the coast of Yemen, the USS Mason, a guided missile destroyer, fired two missiles in defense.
The USS Mason fired missiles defending itself and the USS Ponce, an amphibious dock ship, after it detected inbound cruise missiles presumably fired from Houthi militants on shore in Yemen.
Category: Terror War
Ho Hum.
Nothing is going to happen. If Trump is elected, *MAYBE* we’ll launch 10 or 20 cruise missiles to rock their little casbah.
One can only dream.
Doubtful.
IIRC, production of the Tomahawk is at an all stop, and we’ll run out of them around 2018 unless we crank up production again.
http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/25/obama-kill-navys-tomahawk-hellfire-missile-program/
What the hell is there to “look at”, blow the bastards out of the water post haste!!!
I would anticipate a finger-wagging PSA from Leonardo de Caprio saying that “Firing Missiles at US Ships is NOT OKAY!!!!”
That should do it.
The target deck should be done by now and in the hopper.
“I’m sure that those guys who fired the missiles are shaking in their boots at this point in anticipation of receiving a strongly worded letter from John Kerry promising to sail closer to shore next time.”
Actually, Kerry should send James Taylor. I’d give them 24 hours before they surrender.
Going public with this was a monumentally stupid thing to do.
If we now choose to do nothing, we look like fools.
If we now choose to do something, we’ve given the Houthi rebels strategic warning.
Best strategy would have been to say absolutely nothing – and launch a large retaliatory strike without warning at a time of our choosing. No need to announce why.
Unfortunately, that implies adult leadership in DC that actually knows it’s collective ass from a hole in the ground. We haven’t had that in nearly 8 years now.
^^^^^ This ^^^^^
You misunderstand the brilliant strategy of our Glorious Leader.
Announcing in advance wisely achieves goals:
Pres has “done something” in a strong statement.
Pres then can deliver appropriate strike, large or small based on polling and wind direction.
All mobile life forms will unass the targets, thus minimizing collateral damage to folks who might matter to Iran.
There will be collateral damage to those who -don’t- matter to iran, but -do- matter to the Press and various Tranzis, thus our armed forces can be painted as savages. Pres then nobly apologizes to the affronted.
Pres can then point out to our folks that he did something, and remind everyone that his actions are peaceful and brilliant, unlike those myrmidons on the right who are all unfeeling warmongers.
Glorious and brilliant and wise is Our Leader! Vote early and often for Her Brilliance – Leader 2.0
Honest question here but what do you target? The rebels have the launchers on trucks where they pull up to the shore at night fire off the missiles and are gone quickly. How do you target return fire on something like that when it probably takes hours of consultation with people continents away to get firing authorization?
Just wipe out a few entire cities or towns.
That’ll teach em’.
Scorched earth policy.
Kill *everything. *Everything* that lives.
In the Harrying of the North, William the Conqueror’s solution to stop a rebellion in 1069 was the brutal conquest and subjugation of the North of England. William’s men burnt whole villages from the Humber to Tees, and slaughtered the inhabitants. Food stores and livestock were destroyed so that anyone surviving the initial massacre would soon succumb to starvation over the winter. The destruction is depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry.[9] The survivors were reduced to cannibalism,[10] with one report stating that the skulls of the dead were cracked open so that the brains could be eaten. Between 100,000 and 150,000 perished and the area took centuries to recover from the damage.
CONSIDERING?!?!?!?
Anyone else besides this feckless administration woukd have turned the site from which those missiles were launched into a smoking hole, along with anywhere else those missiles are stored.
100 days, people. 100 days.
WTF ever happened to “Nuke ’em until they glow”? OH that’s right, we have a magical crew in charge that takes care of everything by just talking about it, right? Another clusterfuck in progress from B. Hussein 0bama the Oblivious and his court.
When being shot at – at sea, on the battlefield, or on the street, one does not stop to consider whether or not to shoot back and at whom one ought to shoot.
One immediately returns accurate and overwhelming fire focused upon the point of attack, and continues until the attacker(s) cease all movement.
The idiots in the 5-sided insane asylum and their puppet masters in the administration need to recognize this as a universal truth.
I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that less than a month after we gave Iran $1.4 Billion (with a B) that Houthi terrorists suddenly have guided missiles.
You do understand you are off by an order of magnitude, possibly two?
I think he’s referring only to the cash payment part, 11B-mailclerk. I’ve read the overall total was closer to $40 billion if Iranian assets “unfrozen” by the deal and returned to Iran are included.
John Kerry was quoted as saying “We will send James Taylor, but he won’t do an encore.” That should show them that we mean business. Hack
I’ve suggested this before, but here it is again.
Locate the attackers’ hometown.
Gather enough large pigs to fill a C-130 (or a C-17 if we’re sufficiently pissed off). Starve them for a week or two, when they start getting really aggressive. Sedate them, fit them with parachutes and remote-detonated explosives. Load them onto the aircraft. They should wake up in flight.
Air-drop them into the targeted town, city, village, or encampment. Have drones on station to provide live video feed. Broadcast footage of hungry hogs going to town on anything that has a pulse like a horde of oinking zombies. After an hour or two, remote detonate all remaining pigs.
Make a public statement promising that this is how we will respond every time any islamic terrorist fucks with us from now on. And we have the swine reserve to back it up.
Remote detonation of the swine would provoke a most angry response from PETA and other tree-hugging Dammitcrat voting feel gooders. Let the swine live.
Does this sound like the idea of a man who gives any fucks about tree-huggers’ feelings?
Drop the PETA protestors before the pigs get there. 2 days ought to take care of that….
A Two-fer! Like!
OW, now that is a damned fine idea! I could really get behind that!!
Go with Feral Hogs.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-wild-pigs-ravaging-the-u-s-be-stopped/
Ask anyone in the central and southern U.S. how that’s going for the ecosystem.
You can’t stop those fuckers from eating everything, tearing the fuck out of everything and fucking worse than bunnies…or at least as bad. And aggressive?!?!
I’d rather dry hump a hungry bear cub right in front of it’s mother.
😀 😀 😀
We have an ample supply in Texas, I can testify.
Cant stop them? I am told .45-70 works.
Maybe a Gatling gun in that caliber, 4×4 mounted?
Hashtag Swine Lives Matter
🙂
You people don’t seem to understand that its our fault for having military ships full of storm troopers over there in the first place.
We don’t attack people for firing on our ships. The USS Liberty for example. Nah, we should bring all of our ships home.
No more deployments of any kind until the White House is no longer occupied by a pussy, perceived or biological.
You just equated our sailors to the faceless bad guys in “Star Wars”. Are you saying that our guys are faceless bad guys?
Worse, faceless bad guys who cannot hit a target no matter how much they shoot.
I’m thinking you and Graybeard might need to check yer sarcasm detectors. I think they might be inop.
The Navy can’t be feeling too good. I don’t want to rehash recent events involving the Russians, Iranians, and American naval vessels but, shit, the tolerance level is a tad high, isn’t it? The time for action is contemporaneous with the event that begs for action. By the time the dunderheads get done with it, we end up hitting an aspirin factor with a missile.
Or a camel’s ass.
y. Here’s the damn y. Just because.
Obviously, in the recently neutered DoD, the best offense is a beer fest in the Rose Garden, don’tcha think? You know that part: endeavor to persevere, right?
I have said this before and will say it again: I do not envy whoever gets the job bodaprez is leaving, because the mess that has to be cleaned up is colossal, and this little fiasco is only a small part of it. I’ve seen catboxes with less shit in them.
Apparently there is discussion that the Navy did nothing about these launches.
Quite to the contrary…
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/5523/uss-mason-fired-three-missiles-during-anti-ship-missile-attack-off-yemen?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark
I read that but it is only speculative. The reporter said that the Pentagon would not confirm that the US vessel fired. It seems to me that if it did fire, something was probably hit and if something was hit, there would have been other accounts of the strike. After all, the launch site was land based, we were told. I just don’t know but it’s curious that this is the only story reporting that the Navy fired missiles. Others merely repeat what USNI reported.
The SM-2 and ESSM are SAMs. They’d have been fired at the incoming bogies as defensive measures, not fired at land-based launchers or support bases.
And apparently they were at it again today.
<b. More missiles fired from rebel-held territory in Yemen at U.S. Navy ships….
Missiles were fired from rebel-held territory in Yemen at U.S. Navy ships in the Red Sea on Wednesday, marking the second time in four days that such an attack has occurred, defense officials said.
The missiles were again fired at the USS Mason, a guided-missile destroyer that also came under fire Sunday night.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/10/12/more-missiles-fired-from-rebel-held-territory-in-yemen-at-u-s-navy-ships/
Well, as retaliation, couldn’t some of the crew go out on the weather deck and moon the people firing those missiles?
I see no harm in a little taunting, do you?
The crew could also point needle-guns at them and scream “we come in peace”.
Well, there you go. While the Bigs are discussing what to do, if anything, another missile gets fired from Yemen. Wanna bet the solution is to move the target well away, despite the fact that we are in internat’l waters?
UPDATE: It looks like MASON fired two missiles in retaliation.
How long before the JEF or his mouthpiece tell the press that this was just a “misunderstanding” because Islam is a “religion of peace”?
Again: those were SAMs used as defensive measures. They were not retaliation against the launch sites – which IMO we should have executed within hours if not minutes of the attack.
That was also just a repeat–with attribution–of the USNI report.
I checked the update and the ship fired back. I think more than two might have been appropriate, but perhaps those two were well-place and were not just fired for effect.
No the ship did not fire back; it fired on the incoming missiles. Not the same thing as firing back at the POS shooting at you.
Correct. We still haven’t retaliated.
Isn’t taliation a prerequisite to retaliation? Have we even taliated yet?
We haven’t even ted yet.
“Taliation”? You need a tallywhacker to do that.
IMO, this administration collectively neither has a tallywhacker nor has the knowledge of how to use one appropriately.
Why the hell would we need to “contemplate a response”? The rule has always been that if you take incoming fire from 180 degrees you instantly return fire down the same bearing. Adjust fire as required to stop the stupid bastards from firing at you. This has worked since the advent of gunpowder. Our response should be instant and overwhelming firepower.
In a more perfect world, perhaps, but we have a President, (I use that term very loosely), who is micro managing this whole thing. Rules of Engagement dictate that those fired on must write a double spaced letter to both their congressman and to the chair of the “Committee To Stop Foreign Aggression”, <which has not yet been convened. Upon receipt to each of the two letters, the person(s) may fire warning shots, well overhead of any persons downrange of said shots.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-security-missiles-idUSKCN12C294
Looks like the Houthi just launched another one.
Why not? They got away with it the first time, didn’t they?
This time John Kerry’s letter will be in all caps supported by thousands of exclamation points.
That’ll learn em’
John Paul Jones, et al., are turning over in their graves.
I’m turning over in my grave, and I’m not even dead yet. (No matter what my wife would tell you.) where are all these drones Hillary is always talking about? Don’t we have some in that region? Why not loiter a few in the suspected area and bop a few of these missileers on their raggedy heads.
I blame Zbigniew Brzezinski for all of this and all of the crap we’ve been seeing since 2009. Remember him? He was bodaprez’s foreign policy advisor when that fool was in the Senate so briefly, and as soon as the elections were over, he went right back into the White House. In March 2009, the Navy announced it would reduce the number of people in ratings like AW because they were overstaffed.
If you’ve forgotten who he is, he’s the one who talked Jimmy Carter into supporting the Taliban against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Remember that?
In Jan.1998, Brzezinski said, in an interview with Le Nouvel Observaeur “What is more important to the history of the world? The end of the Soviet empire or the Taliban? The end of Soviet control of eastern Europe and a free Europe, or a few disgruntled muslims?”
A FEW DISGRUNTLED MUSLIMS??????
Well, just look where we are now.
I’m really curious as to what’s going to happen in diplomatic meetings between us and Iran from here on. Their proxy war bullshit rivals our own except we’re the targets now.