Monday, February 15, 2016

I WONDER IF THE IRANIANS STAMPED THEIR PASSPORTS

I see from the Daily Mail that Senator McCain is not happy at getting blown off by the Navy and is reacting as is his wont. I don't expect anything will come of it since the Navy will simply refuse to furnish the sailors even if they are subpoenaed to testify, as is their wont. Still, it would be nice to know how exactly two fully armed Navy patrol boats crewed by Riverine sailors managed to gaff off all the navigation information that showed them to be near Iranian territorial seas.

There were at least two, and more likely four, global positioning systems on those two boats. Two military GPS units because the boats constitute a weapon system and need to have MILSPEC GPS and two regular commercial systems because the boats are almost certainly fitted with a Blue Force Tracker that makes use of the friendlier and easier to work with commercial GPS units. And besides, all that navigation equipment they so busily ignored while attending to their grooming really only works with input from commercial spec GPS units that are built to be integrated into the Navigation Plot and the Radar Plot and right there in front of the coxswain and the boat commanders.

A bunch of left handed rubber swabhandles having a bite in Farsi
I get a kick out of the sailor eating with his left hand. Surely he had long enough in-country to know that arabs and their friends the Persians eat only with the right hands because they consider the left hand, 'unclean.' I don't know if he's ignorant or making a point. It is a special point with me that not one of the Riverine sailors could muster up a uniform to surrender in. I wonder if they even had full uniforms onboard anywhere. In my times over there it was unlikely that the Special Boat guys working with us had real uniforms onboard, but they, like us, were permitted to dress pirate while on task in the Gulf. It's not like we were going to surrender to anybody.

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