[tsotha]

Iranian patrol boats always had anti-shipping missiles. They don't have many patrol boats, though, and they don't have many missiles. Beyond that, if you're going to use a missile there's no point in putting it on a boat if your target is in the Straight of Hormuz. You just launch it from land.

The concern is the Iranians (or whoever) would use speedboats packed with explosives and ram them into US ships. Speedboats and explosives are cheap, so this is a pretty easy attack to put together, and if it's a sneak attack you could get closer by having them pretend to be ordinary civilian traffic.

But the attack is pretty easy to counter, too - the Navy issued .50 cal machine guns with a mount that clips on the rails. The M-2 has a range of almost two kilometers and will turn a speedboat into kindling in just a few seconds.

Beyond that, people (particularly Dolan, who thinks everybody not him is an idiot) who point to that particular exercise have a fundamental misunderstanding of the way these things work. You can't get that many people and ships together doing whatever they want and not have casualties. The Navy did stop the exercise, and while they're not talking the most likely reason is the red team wasn't following the rules. The point of these kind of exercises isn't to develop new and innovative tactics - the point is to make sure everybody does what they're supposed to do.