12 ms·

> they saw this contact heading towards them labeled as an F-14 fighter. What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 figh

by smcl 3y ago

> they saw this contact heading towards them labeled as an F-14 fighter. What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. Was there no moment where they thought "maybe there has been a mistake?" - like where Stanislav Petrov chose to interpret the Soviet early warning system telling him an ICBM was incoming as being a result of some faulty instruments. Granted the stakes were slightly different - downing one airliner is less severe than risking starting a global nuclear annihilation.

ghaff 3y ago
In the moment, it's really hard to step back and ask yourself "Does this make any sense?" when you're primed to react in some particular way.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Especially with an element of "I might personally get blown up" involved.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Yet the Cuban missile crisis with the stake of the entire world didn't escalate.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      1. More time to think. An incoming F-14 is a minutes/seconds scenario; the Cuban crisis lasted 10 days. 2. "X did not happen" does not mean "Y was not a factor in X". The "about to get blown up" factor was part of the reason the Cuban missile crisis happened; it's also probably part of the resolution.
    - Cyph0n 3y ago
      There were some close calls during the Cold War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
      - graphe 3y ago
        For some reason I mixed this with the Cuban missile crisis, I thought it had something to do with it.
      - cozzyd 3y ago
        My favorite is https://blog.ucsusa.org/david-wright/the-moon-and-nuclear-war-904/ https://blog.ucsusa.org/david-wright/the-moon-and-nuclear-wa...
    - Merad 3y ago
      We got _incredibly_ lucky. A Soviet submarine trying to get through the blockade believed that war had broken out and wanted to attack the US fleet with nuclear torpedoes [0]. Normally only two men aboard the sub had to approve the nuclear launch, and they both wanted to fire. This particular sub happened to have a third officer [1] on board who also needed to approve the launch, and he may have literally saved the world by disagreeing with the other two officers. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Averted_nuclear_launch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Averted_n... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov
      - ghaff 3y ago
        And my understanding is the US military leadership was generally in favor of attacking Cuba not knowing there were already nuclear warheads there.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    With proper training, that should be irrelevant. They probably had second thoughts, but they got confirmation that contact 4474 was descending rapidly.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      No amount of training is likely to completely remove human factors. It helps, sometimes a lot, but there's always going to be a bit of a difference thinking actual ordinance is currently headed directly at you.
    - angiosperm 3y ago
      It was a disgraceful dereliction of duty by the implementers of Aegis to recycle contact IDs so eagerly. With 4 digits it should have taken 10,000 subsequent contacts before that number came around again.
      - rbanffy 3y ago
        It was a lack of imagination. They didn't anticipate that case and probably just selected the contact IDs randomly. A bad RNG and an unlucky day is all it takes.
        angiosperm 3y ago
        Sequential numbering would have been much less confusing to operators.
mannykannot 3y ago
Maybe (probably?) it did seem crazy, but the officers sought verification from the system and seemed to get it. They were probably unaware that there was an airliner in their vicinity, as it had been incorrectly tagged as an F-14. I don't know where the actual F-14 was, but quite possibly nowhere in the vicinity of the ship.
krisoft 3y ago
> What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. What is sudden about that? "Two months before the incident, the U.S. had engaged in Operation Praying Mantis, resulting in the sinkings of the Iranian frigate Sahand, the Iranian fast attack craft Joshan, and three Iranian speedboats. Also, the Iranian frigate Sabalan was crippled, two Iranian platforms were destroyed, and an Iranian fighter was damaged. A total of at least 56 Iranian crew were killed" And on the very day their helicopter received small arm fire from an Iranian patrol vessel, which they were pursuing when the shoot-down happened. In this situation the idea that Iran would launch a fighter against them is not that wild.
- outworlder 3y ago
  > In this situation the idea that Iran would launch a fighter against them is not that wild. Why would they launch a single fighter to attack a warship?
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
  - toast0 3y ago
    Patrol ship sees and engages a foreign warship inside the patrol's territorial waters and radios for help. First fighter available launches and flies that way to investigate. Sees the warship engaged with the patrol boat and takes initiative, while other fighters are prepping for launch for follow on attacks in case the invading warship does not retreat or surrender.
    - gpderetta 3y ago
      The issue is "single". Does scrambling a single fighter ever happen, don't they always fly in pairs? A single attack or recognisance plane would make sense. Of course they might have known that their ability to properly identify the threat was limited, but that raises even more questions...
xen2xen1 3y ago
As far as I understand it, a single F14 could launch a single Exocet missile, and make a VERY large hole in an aircraft carrier, and if the conditions were right, putting it to the bottom of the sea. Or the same for a battleship. I seem to recall that being a large concern even then, if not especially then.
- blobcode 3y ago
  To my knowledge, the F-14 never carried any anti-ship missile, especially on the early-model Iranian Tomcats, as the F-14 only received an air-to-ground upgrade package in the 90’s.
  - kayodelycaon 3y ago
    Yup. Some quick googling shows F-14 had LANTIRN pods added and upgraded software to support smart bombs in the mid-90s. All models appear to completely lack the necessary software and hardware to use self-guided ground-attack weapons. A hefty unguided bomb would be possible, but a WW2 dive bomber would have better accuracy. You’re probably better off using the gun. With a lot of luck, you could mission-kill a frigate. Radar arrays don’t like to be rapidly disassembled.
    - toss1 3y ago
      ... which we can all discuss at leisure from our armchairs with zero of the stress associated with being in the command chair that day. Just because commenters here may come up with some down-in-the-weeds detailed analysis that could have, if known then, changed the course of events, does not mean that it's reasonable to have come up with that in the heat of battle. There is a reason that the practice is called "Monday Morning Quarterbacking".
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        If you are commander of an explicitly Anti-Air cruiser, and you are unaware that any F-14 tasked against you would not have an anti-ship missile and would be abusing some other weapon "off-label", then you should not be defending a carrier fleet from aircraft. You should be familiar with the airframes, weapons, and abilities of your adversary. The F-14 is not an attack aircraft! It was designed to intercept incoming air threats and bombers!
leetcrew 3y ago
a US frigate (uss stark) was severely damaged by a single Iraqi plane in the previous year. the captain did not expect an Iraqi attack, so he tried to warn the plane off multiple times, ultimately allowing it to fire two missiles which hit his ship. the missiles would likely have been shot down if the Stark's countermeasures were working correctly. but they weren't, and 37 Americans died. given that context, it doesn't seem wild to take an Iranian plane as a serious threat.
wil421 3y ago
Iraq attacked the USS Stark a year before. They used a business jet with an Exocet missile attached to it. This was by mistake but it still happened. A single plane shooting down a ship is not unheard of but the US has done it in pairs to the whole Iran navy.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  I thought it was an F-1 Mirage?
ARandomerDude 3y ago
"Captain, why where you derelict in your duty to protect your ship and crew?" "Well, I just thought a single F-14 was probably not that big of a deal."
snakeyjake 3y ago
>What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. Limited hit and run attacks were typical Iranian behavior at the time. The US tested to see if the F-14 could launch a Harpoon anti-ship missile just a couple of years prior to this because Iran had both F-14s and Harpoons. The test was successful. It is highly unlikely that Iran ever equipped the F-14 with Harpoons but the thought that they would because it was a capability they possessed was a very real fear at the time.
Nition 3y ago
It sounds like the real pro strat for an attack would have been to launch a single F-14 with a commercial jet taking off right up close behind you. "Sure that plane looks like it's moving fast and diving straight towards us, but it's just an Airbus A300."
- smcl 3y ago
  Doesn't sound like the guy Will Rogers made that decision though. It sounds like he just blindly trusted his instruments, knowing he could act with impunity. He was right - after all is said and done he killed 290 innocent people and he ended up getting something called the "Legion of Merit" so it doesn't sound like it bothered too many people there.
sillywalk 3y ago
UI failings aside, a few points, mostly from the US Naval Institute's Proceedings[2] (which has references to the Official Investigation "Fogarty report"[3]) - it was standard practice to illuminate Iranian military aircraft with missile fire control radar as a warning for them to turn around. "When you put that radar on them, they went home. They were not interested in any missiles," Captain Carlson recalled. - the captain of the Vincennes was known as trigger-happy and the Vincennes was nicknamed the Robo-Cruiser. - the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time of the shoot-down - data from USS Vincennes' tapes, information from USS Sides and reliable intelligence information corroborate the fact that TN 4131 was on a normal commercial air flight plan profile…squawking Mode III 6760, on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas to shoot down." - "Capt. Rogers was a difficult student. He wasn’t interested in the expertise of the instructors and had the disconcerting habit of violating the Rules of Engagement in the wargames." [2] - Commander Lustig, the air-warfare coordinator, even won the navy's Commendation Medal for "heroic achievement," his "ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire," enabling him to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure. - all hands aboard the Vincennes and the Elmer Montgomery received combat action ribbons." ... [1] https://www.newsweek.com/sea-lies-200118 https://www.newsweek.com/sea-lies-200118 [2] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1993/august/vincennes-case-study https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1993/august/vince... [3] https://archive.org/details/FormalInvestigationintotheCircumstancesSurroundingtheDowningofIranAirFlight655on3July1988 https://archive.org/details/FormalInvestigationintotheCircum...
- cutemonster 3y ago
  And, from your [2]: > Then Vice President George Bush had gone before the United Nations on 14 July and declared, "One thing is clear, and that is that USS Vincennes acted in self-defense…It occurred in the midst of a naval attack initiated by Iranian vessels [...] > As it came to pass, none of this was true. > However, the truth of the matter would have given the Democratic candidate for President, Michael Dukakis, ammunition to embarrass George Bush. > There were good reasons for spinning the story in a way that put the Iranians in the worst possible light. And so the trigger happy captain got that ribbon instead
michael1999 3y ago
All evidence is that Captain Will Rogers was a very different kind of person than Stanislav Petrov. The US military is famous for preferring "forward leaning" types. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-the-story-of-the-shootdown-of-iran-air-flight-655-ef7bdf1e9f75 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t...

by smcl 3y ago

ghaff 3y ago

In the moment, it's really hard to step back and ask yourself "Does this make any sense?" when you're primed to react in some particular way.

ceejayoz 3y ago
Especially with an element of "I might personally get blown up" involved.
- graphe 3y ago
  Yet the Cuban missile crisis with the stake of the entire world didn't escalate.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    1. More time to think. An incoming F-14 is a minutes/seconds scenario; the Cuban crisis lasted 10 days. 2. "X did not happen" does not mean "Y was not a factor in X". The "about to get blown up" factor was part of the reason the Cuban missile crisis happened; it's also probably part of the resolution.
  - Cyph0n 3y ago
    There were some close calls during the Cold War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
    - graphe 3y ago
      For some reason I mixed this with the Cuban missile crisis, I thought it had something to do with it.
    - cozzyd 3y ago
      My favorite is https://blog.ucsusa.org/david-wright/the-moon-and-nuclear-war-904/ https://blog.ucsusa.org/david-wright/the-moon-and-nuclear-wa...
  - Merad 3y ago
    We got _incredibly_ lucky. A Soviet submarine trying to get through the blockade believed that war had broken out and wanted to attack the US fleet with nuclear torpedoes [0]. Normally only two men aboard the sub had to approve the nuclear launch, and they both wanted to fire. This particular sub happened to have a third officer [1] on board who also needed to approve the launch, and he may have literally saved the world by disagreeing with the other two officers. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Averted_nuclear_launch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Averted_n... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov
    - ghaff 3y ago
      And my understanding is the US military leadership was generally in favor of attacking Cuba not knowing there were already nuclear warheads there.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  With proper training, that should be irrelevant. They probably had second thoughts, but they got confirmation that contact 4474 was descending rapidly.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    No amount of training is likely to completely remove human factors. It helps, sometimes a lot, but there's always going to be a bit of a difference thinking actual ordinance is currently headed directly at you.
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    It was a disgraceful dereliction of duty by the implementers of Aegis to recycle contact IDs so eagerly. With 4 digits it should have taken 10,000 subsequent contacts before that number came around again.
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      It was a lack of imagination. They didn't anticipate that case and probably just selected the contact IDs randomly. A bad RNG and an unlucky day is all it takes.
      - angiosperm 3y ago
        Sequential numbering would have been much less confusing to operators.

mannykannot 3y ago

Maybe (probably?) it did seem crazy, but the officers sought verification from the system and seemed to get it. They were probably unaware that there was an airliner in their vicinity, as it had been incorrectly tagged as an F-14. I don't know where the actual F-14 was, but quite possibly nowhere in the vicinity of the ship.

krisoft 3y ago

> What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. What is sudden about that? "Two months before the incident, the U.S. had engaged in Operation Praying Mantis, resulting in the sinkings of the Iranian frigate Sahand, the Iranian fast attack craft Joshan, and three Iranian speedboats. Also, the Iranian frigate Sabalan was crippled, two Iranian platforms were destroyed, and an Iranian fighter was damaged. A total of at least 56 Iranian crew were killed" And on the very day their helicopter received small arm fire from an Iranian patrol vessel, which they were pursuing when the shoot-down happened. In this situation the idea that Iran would launch a fighter against them is not that wild.

outworlder 3y ago
> In this situation the idea that Iran would launch a fighter against them is not that wild. Why would they launch a single fighter to attack a warship?
- networkchad 3y ago
  [dead]
- toast0 3y ago
  Patrol ship sees and engages a foreign warship inside the patrol's territorial waters and radios for help. First fighter available launches and flies that way to investigate. Sees the warship engaged with the patrol boat and takes initiative, while other fighters are prepping for launch for follow on attacks in case the invading warship does not retreat or surrender.
  - gpderetta 3y ago
    The issue is "single". Does scrambling a single fighter ever happen, don't they always fly in pairs? A single attack or recognisance plane would make sense. Of course they might have known that their ability to properly identify the threat was limited, but that raises even more questions...

xen2xen1 3y ago

As far as I understand it, a single F14 could launch a single Exocet missile, and make a VERY large hole in an aircraft carrier, and if the conditions were right, putting it to the bottom of the sea. Or the same for a battleship. I seem to recall that being a large concern even then, if not especially then.

blobcode 3y ago
To my knowledge, the F-14 never carried any anti-ship missile, especially on the early-model Iranian Tomcats, as the F-14 only received an air-to-ground upgrade package in the 90’s.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Yup. Some quick googling shows F-14 had LANTIRN pods added and upgraded software to support smart bombs in the mid-90s. All models appear to completely lack the necessary software and hardware to use self-guided ground-attack weapons. A hefty unguided bomb would be possible, but a WW2 dive bomber would have better accuracy. You’re probably better off using the gun. With a lot of luck, you could mission-kill a frigate. Radar arrays don’t like to be rapidly disassembled.
  - toss1 3y ago
    ... which we can all discuss at leisure from our armchairs with zero of the stress associated with being in the command chair that day. Just because commenters here may come up with some down-in-the-weeds detailed analysis that could have, if known then, changed the course of events, does not mean that it's reasonable to have come up with that in the heat of battle. There is a reason that the practice is called "Monday Morning Quarterbacking".
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      If you are commander of an explicitly Anti-Air cruiser, and you are unaware that any F-14 tasked against you would not have an anti-ship missile and would be abusing some other weapon "off-label", then you should not be defending a carrier fleet from aircraft. You should be familiar with the airframes, weapons, and abilities of your adversary. The F-14 is not an attack aircraft! It was designed to intercept incoming air threats and bombers!

leetcrew 3y ago

a US frigate (uss stark) was severely damaged by a single Iraqi plane in the previous year. the captain did not expect an Iraqi attack, so he tried to warn the plane off multiple times, ultimately allowing it to fire two missiles which hit his ship. the missiles would likely have been shot down if the Stark's countermeasures were working correctly. but they weren't, and 37 Americans died. given that context, it doesn't seem wild to take an Iranian plane as a serious threat.

wil421 3y ago

Iraq attacked the USS Stark a year before. They used a business jet with an Exocet missile attached to it. This was by mistake but it still happened. A single plane shooting down a ship is not unheard of but the US has done it in pairs to the whole Iran navy.

sillywalk 3y ago
I thought it was an F-1 Mirage?

ARandomerDude 3y ago

"Captain, why where you derelict in your duty to protect your ship and crew?" "Well, I just thought a single F-14 was probably not that big of a deal."

snakeyjake 3y ago

>What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. Limited hit and run attacks were typical Iranian behavior at the time. The US tested to see if the F-14 could launch a Harpoon anti-ship missile just a couple of years prior to this because Iran had both F-14s and Harpoons. The test was successful. It is highly unlikely that Iran ever equipped the F-14 with Harpoons but the thought that they would because it was a capability they possessed was a very real fear at the time.

Nition 3y ago

It sounds like the real pro strat for an attack would have been to launch a single F-14 with a commercial jet taking off right up close behind you. "Sure that plane looks like it's moving fast and diving straight towards us, but it's just an Airbus A300."

smcl 3y ago
Doesn't sound like the guy Will Rogers made that decision though. It sounds like he just blindly trusted his instruments, knowing he could act with impunity. He was right - after all is said and done he killed 290 innocent people and he ended up getting something called the "Legion of Merit" so it doesn't sound like it bothered too many people there.

sillywalk 3y ago

UI failings aside, a few points, mostly from the US Naval Institute's Proceedings[2] (which has references to the Official Investigation "Fogarty report"[3]) - it was standard practice to illuminate Iranian military aircraft with missile fire control radar as a warning for them to turn around. "When you put that radar on them, they went home. They were not interested in any missiles," Captain Carlson recalled. - the captain of the Vincennes was known as trigger-happy and the Vincennes was nicknamed the Robo-Cruiser. - the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time of the shoot-down - data from USS Vincennes' tapes, information from USS Sides and reliable intelligence information corroborate the fact that TN 4131 was on a normal commercial air flight plan profile…squawking Mode III 6760, on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas to shoot down." - "Capt. Rogers was a difficult student. He wasn’t interested in the expertise of the instructors and had the disconcerting habit of violating the Rules of Engagement in the wargames." [2] - Commander Lustig, the air-warfare coordinator, even won the navy's Commendation Medal for "heroic achievement," his "ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire," enabling him to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure. - all hands aboard the Vincennes and the Elmer Montgomery received combat action ribbons." ... [1] https://www.newsweek.com/sea-lies-200118 https://www.newsweek.com/sea-lies-200118 [2] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1993/august/vincennes-case-study https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1993/august/vince... [3] https://archive.org/details/FormalInvestigationintotheCircumstancesSurroundingtheDowningofIranAirFlight655on3July1988 https://archive.org/details/FormalInvestigationintotheCircum...

cutemonster 3y ago
And, from your [2]: > Then Vice President George Bush had gone before the United Nations on 14 July and declared, "One thing is clear, and that is that USS Vincennes acted in self-defense…It occurred in the midst of a naval attack initiated by Iranian vessels [...] > As it came to pass, none of this was true. > However, the truth of the matter would have given the Democratic candidate for President, Michael Dukakis, ammunition to embarrass George Bush. > There were good reasons for spinning the story in a way that put the Iranians in the worst possible light. And so the trigger happy captain got that ribbon instead

michael1999 3y ago

All evidence is that Captain Will Rogers was a very different kind of person than Stanislav Petrov. The US military is famous for preferring "forward leaning" types. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-the-story-of-the-shootdown-of-iran-air-flight-655-ef7bdf1e9f75 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t...