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by lambda_obrien 1912 days ago
Folks, there are very strict conditions under which a Navy ship can use weapons, and some unknown aircraft isn't gonna be a situation that they're going to open fire. You could be shooting some moron in an ultralight or some kids science project or whatever.

The US Navy is a professional organization, not some scared cops who shoot first and ask questions later.

Edit: I'm done here, but please stop all the military fantasy where everything is a threat and needs to be shot. This was like 50 miles from the coast of the USA, not Iran or NK.

2 comments

Unfortunately, I think it's a little more 21st Century Pearl Harbor, and less or at all benevolent.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/J0jD8Swl3h8/maxresdefault.jpg

Frankly, your thoughts don't matter because you don't have the expertise to judge.
Frankly, a terse comment. So tell me what am I missing?
Oh, so you do have the expertise to judge, but that other poster doesn't. Gotcha.

Can you please point me to the thread where you justify this (otherwise unbearably arrogant) response with your credentials?

(Seriously, how did this comment not get yanked as an obvious ad hom troll?)

I'm a former SWO qualified Naval officer, as stated elsewhere I believe. I vouched your comment just to reply, because it's important to be correct. I'm not going into details about anything else, I've gone into detail elsewhere about this topic already.
You come here to comment rudely, well outside your supposed SWO naval officer context, but without demonstrating evidence of any qualification in a relevant and visible context, and others are the idiots for doubting such absurdly terse replies on a technology site where explanation and questions are par for the course among many types of technical experts? Is being a socially clueless asshole part of your qualification requisites as well?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

Don't know if that last part has always been true.

Yes, and every officer since then has been drilled not to do such mistakes. The military fucks up like this sometimes, but that's one event out of millions of miles steamed.

Not defending this event, those sailors should have been court martialed, but your snarky comment didn't add anything.