When Iraq's 1980 invasion of Iran ended in a bloody stalemate, it was natural for both sides to turn to other ways of bringing pressure on their enemies. These ranged from firing missiles at the other guy's cities to attacking the oil exports that fueled their economies. Iraq had started to route its exports through Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and as Iran expanded its attacks to include neutral shipping, the US grew increasingly concerned, both about the flow of oil from the Arabian Gulf,¹ and potential Soviet influence in that vital region. As a result, the Administration agreed in March 1987 to reflag 11 Kuwaiti tankers as American vessels, allowing the USN to escort them through the Gulf.

Stark next to flagship La Salle in Bahrain

Two months later, even before the escort operations began, the frigate Stark was accidentally attacked by the Iraqis in a tragic case of mistaken identity. Previously, the increasing US involvement in the Gulf had been a matter of little concern, but 37 dead sailors was enough to get the country's attention. Opponents of the administration charged that it was involving the US in an open-ended war against Iran without thinking through what would be needed to win or getting the approval of Congress. Many compared it to the Administration's bungled Lebanon strategy of a few years earlier. A particular concern was that the Iranians usually attacked tankers in retaliation for Iraqi strikes, so the vulnerability of American ships depended heavily on what Saddam did, and he wasn't even vaguely an ally. But he was smart enough to pause attacks on Iranian shipping as the escort operation began. The Iranians were obviously upset, but their actions rarely matched their rhetoric, so the reflagging went ahead and the first convoy was scheduled for late July 1987. Read more...

One of the first tasks of a new British prime minister is writing four letters. These "Letters of Last Resort", each identically worded and written by hand after a briefing on the destructive power of the Trident missile, are sealed and delivered to the four British Vanguard class submarines. They contain instructions on what to do in the event of nuclear war, and will only be opened if the submarine's crew determines that Britain has suffered an attack and no orders are forthcoming. If this doesn't happen, they will be destroyed unopened when the next Prime Minister takes office.

One of the chief problems of any nuclear deterrent is that both the weapons themselves and the command-and-control infrastructure will be prime targets for an enemy's nuclear weapons. The first problem is relatively easy to deal with, and most countries solve it by sending some of their nukes to sea aboard submarines, which are by nature difficult to find. The British, in fact, like this approach so much that they chose it for their entire nuclear arsenal. But nuclear weapons aboard a submarine, while fairly safe, are also of little use if orders to fire them can't be given. The US solves this with a massive command-and-control infrastructure, including not one, not two but three different converted airliners. But there are two problems with this kind of system from a British perspective. First, it's really expensive, and the British can't afford US defense budgets. Second, Britain is considerably closer to potential threats, who should remain nameless but who I will assign the randomly-chosen name "Russia" to, than the US is. This gives even less time to get a message off to any nuclear forces, to say nothing of the problems of communicating with SSBNs. Read more...

On October 14th, 1944, the three carrier groups of TF 38 were conducting strikes on Formosa. The operation had been planned to provide distant cover for the approaching landings at Leyte, and had been scheduled to wrap up the previous day. However, heavy cruiser Canberra had been torpedoed during the last set of strikes, and it was decided to tow her home instead of scuttling her, which required an extension. Three groups would again spend the morning pounding the airfields of Formosa, while the fourth was dispatched against Japanese air bases in northern Luzon. The strikes themselves encountered little opposition, but also failed to shut down the air bases, and all of the US carriers groups were trailed by snoopers throughout the day. TG 38.2 and TG 38.3 began to withdraw in the afternoon, leaving behind TG 38.1, the Task Group Canberra had originally been assigned to, to cover the withdrawal of the crippled cruiser.

Houston underway earlier in 1944

As such, it was TG 38.1 that caught the bulk of the Japanese dusk attack, again in the form of torpedo bombers. 11 to 16 Frans appeared, and while most were shot down or driven off by AA fire, a few got through to drop their torpedoes. This time, their target was light cruiser Houston, transferred from TG 38.2 the previous day to take over Canberra's station. She found herself facing three torpedoes in the water, two to port and one to starboard. Only the one from starboard got through, but it hit in the worst possible spot. The ship had been turning to evade, rolling heavily to port, so the torpedo detonated against the ship's bottom, halfway between the centerline and the bilge keel, and directly under the turbines for shaft 1 in the forward engine room. The space flooded almost instantly, and the explosion damaged the bulkheads forward and aft, flooding both boiler rooms over the next few minutes. Read more...

"For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:"

This line from the Declaration of Independence, which we have just celebrated the 250th anniversary of, comes from the practice of trying certain cases relating to navigation, smuggling and the Stamp Act of 1765 in Vice-Admiralty Courts. These operated under a completely different legal system from that of the standard Common Law, and as you can guess from the quote, didn't have juries. From the perspective of actually getting the law enforced, this made a great deal of sense. In the nascent United States, the Stamp Act was wildly unpopular, as it imposed taxes on various kinds of goods to support British troops stationed in North America after the Seven Years War. Local juries would simply refuse to convict even obvious violations, so the Vice-Admiralty courts where judges from England could deliver verdicts directly were the obvious place to turn. And also an obvious instrument of repressive tyranny that fully justified the Revolution.

But how did it get to the point that there was this entirely separate system of laws that the British could turn to when they needed to bypass local juries? The idea of there being a separate Admiralty law, common among nations, is so old that nobody is quite sure how old it is. Nineteenth-century legal scholars often traced its origins to a code dating to 900 BC on the island of Rhodes, although there's not a ton of evidence that there was a coherent law code dating back quite that far. However, we do have references to a "Rhodian law" in a Roman law text from the third century AD, the idea that if some part of a vessel's cargo has to be jettisoned in an emergency, the loss will be shared among everyone who had cargo aboard. Astonishingly, this principle, known as General Average, continues to be part of maritime law today. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Overhauls are Jackie Fisher, Auxiliaries Part 2, Impressment, The 3T Missiles - Introduction and for 2025, my reviews of Fort Point and Nike Site SF88, Thoughts on the Israel-Iranian War and The Tanker War Part 1.

On Friday, October 13th, 1944, TF 38 was conducting strikes off the coast of Formosa (now Taiwan). It was the second and final day of an operation to wipe out Japanese air strength on the island in preparation for the upcoming landings on Leyte, and they had been reasonably successful all day. But as evening fell, a group of Japanese Betty torpedo bombers attacked, coming in so low that radar failed to spot them. Four went for the carrier Franklin and while all of their torpedoes missed, one crashed onto her deck, bursting into flames before sliding over the side.² Eight others bored in on heavy cruiser Canberra,³ and while six were shot down by the group's AA fire, one of the torpedoes struck home, detonating at the boundary between the two aft boiler rooms. A mast-high fireball was followed by the usual geyser of water, and violent vertical vibrations ran through the hull. Both boiler rooms flooded almost immediately, leaving no survivors, and fuel oil blown out of the air intakes from boiler 4 covered the deck nearby, but fortunately didn't ignite.

Canberra with 3rd Fleet a few days before being torpedoed

But the bigger problem was that the explosion was directly under one of the bearings for shaft 1, which was ripped from the reduction gearing forward and thrown upwards and inboard, tearing holes in the bulkheads of both the fore and aft engine rooms. Water began pouring into both, filling the aft engine room in 4 minutes and the forward one in 10. Although the boilers in the forward two rooms remained intact and continued to generate power, Canberra was dead in the water. Her rudder was also jammed over, the result of a last-minute attempt to dodge the torpedo, and while the emergency diesel generator would normally have provided power to the steering gear, breakers kept tripping. Eventually, the rudder was put amidships using the ship's roll, opening the hydraulic valves on the steering gear to allow it to swing amidships, then closing them to stop it swinging back. The electrical problems were not helped by numerous leaks in spaces fore and aft of the flooded machinery spaces, as the stuffing glands for electrical cables proved to be less watertight than expected. The leaks were all controlled fairly quickly, thanks to the cruiser's highly-trained damage control team, and only a few spaces saw more than a couple inches of water. Read more...

Old Fort Niagara is a bit of an unusual site for me to cover. Despite being at the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario, it's not really a coastal fort, because 20 miles up the Niagara River is Niagara Falls, which is a bit of an obstacle to navigation. Instead, it was established in 1726 by the French to control the portage route between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and dominate trade through the Great Lakes. Things were fairly quiet until the outbreak of the Seven Years War, when the British managed to capture the Fort, and ultimately all of the territory the French had in the northern portion of North America. It was an important position for the British during the American revolution, ensuring they kept a hold on the western Great Lakes. Despite the territory being given to the US at the end of the war in 1783, the British didn't withdraw until 1796, when the Jay Treaty finally convinced them to hand over the forts in the then-western portion of the US.

The fort's parade ground, from one of the towers

Website

The fort's last war was the War of 1812, when it spent a while fighting artillery duels with Fort George, its British counterpart on the other side of the Niagara River before the British managed to capture it. It was returned to the Americans after the end of the war, and while the position was improved a couple of times during tension with Britain in the rest of the 19th century, first when rebellions broke out in Canada in 1837-1838 which saw a stone wall built along the riverfront, and then during the Civil War, which saw a brick casemate wall constructed along the fort's landward side. Since then, things with Canada have been peaceful (so far), and the fort was turned into a museum. Read more...

Ever since I moved to Oklahoma, one of my favorite military museums has been the 45th Infantry Division Museum. Not because it was a brilliant example of the art of making museums, because it wasn't, but it was close and interesting and characterful, an old building bursting at the seams with occasionally random artifacts. There was a sign in it that included the line "today, as we enter the 90s", and that more or less summed up how it was. But a year ago, they closed it to move to a new facility, which they were calling the Oklahoma National Guard Museum.⁴ I'd been keeping an eye on progress, and made sure to show up a couple hours after it opened on Friday, June 12th, 2026.

The museum's very effective entrance

Website (Outdated)

To cut to the heart of the matter, I like the new museum less than the old one. It's not a bad museum by any means. If I was the state of Oklahoma and mostly wanted a museum as a recruiting tool for my Guard units (and also was trying to shut up the Air Guard's complaints about the pro-Army bias of the 45th Infantry Museum), I would probably be pretty happy with what I'd gotten for my money. The exhibits are generally done fairly well, it's spacious and modern and doesn't have weird dead-end rooms, and everything is freshly painted. A school field trip could go there without having to budget an hour on the back end for search parties. And the sort of corridor of vehicles in front of the building is really well-done, probably the best military museum entrance I've ever seen. Read more...

Back when I was a tour guide, people would occasionally ask me why I referred to Iowa as she. My reply was always the same. "To quote Admiral Nimitz, 'A warship is always referred to as she because it costs so much to keep one in paint and powder.'" It's a good line, and it almost always got a laugh, and let me move on quickly. Because the one problem is that it's not really true.

Keeping Nimitz in paint

If you ask a linguist, they'll tell you that the use of "she" for ships is a remnant of when English used to be gendered, like most European languages. But English lost that a thousand years ago or so, when Vikings and Frenchmen invaded, each bringing their own gendering system with them, and it eventually just made sense to ditch the whole thing. And that makes sense, as far as it goes, but raises the question of why it was ships that survived with their gender most strongly intact. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

The big event since I was last here was the Naval Gazing meetup in Dayton. Everyone had a great time, and I'm looking forward to next year. I also am curious how much people want me to start posting extracts from my tour script as blog posts versus waiting for me to get the audio we recorded out as a podcast with slides.

Overhauls are Russian Battleships Part 3, Battleship Aviation Part 2, A Brief History of the Submarine, FFG(X), Tomahawk Parts one and four, NWAS - Poseidon, my review of Greyhound, Don't Overread Moskva and for 2024 Pentagon Wars and Procurement, Simplified Ships and Shipbuilding, my review of the Western Museum of Flight and my thoughts on Hornet and visitor experience.