Posted on 02/19/2024 5:28:27 PM PST by Paul R.
Thats just how ownership worked at the time. Flags of convenience were just getting started. Panama was the first, and some Panama flagged ships are listed.
So what ship owners are going to put their ships up for, cross Atlantic convoy duty or cross Pacific, when they won’t even risk the gulf of Aden against Third World Terrorists?
Simple - the government compensates shipowners for losses.
This happened to my great grandfather. He, a Spaniard, owned a few interisland vessels in the Philippines (500 tons or less). USAFFE chartered all of them in 1941. They offered compensation for loss or damage. As it happens all of them were sunk or destroyed by April 1942. One was burned at a pier after a Jap airstrike, one was driven aground by a patrol boat, another was boarded and seized, and the Japs lost it later.
In 1946-48 he was offered cash compensation or new surplus hulls (ex-minesweepers). He took the ships.
That was the deal in WW2.
Time to revise the ROE.
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Not until the policy changes. If it hurts the US, its good. If it is good for the US make it hurt.
they’ll just declare sanctions against a country with some ships and steal them.
“Brits don’t take this shit on the high seas lightly. At least historically.”
Historically. England is now overrun with muslims.
I don’t know about that relatively small number. Fairly early on, we had a pilot in a Harrier, flying off the Bataan, rack up 7 drone kills. I have a feeling that unless a drone gets near a ship, we are not usually hearing about them.
That business about old Harriers downing drones is interesting. It really doesn’t have a great radar for the task (we have much better), but it seems to be getting the job done anyway.
In any event, as I noted above, the USN in the neighborhood is really stretched thin. We only have 4 Arleigh-Burke destroyers in the area to defend the entire Red Sea, the straits, and a good chunk of the Gulf of Aden. At any one time at least one of those destroyers has to be making a run back to base to load up munitions and supplies. The Bataan is back in the Med. The Ike is on hand, da, but seems to be tasked mostly with popping Houthi land targets. In any event, the Ike is not the resource you want chasing up and down the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Aden too. You want it where its remarkable surveillance capabilities are optimal.
SFAIK, no ship actually being shepherded by our destroyers has been hit. That’s great work. Better than I expected at the outset, really. But it can’t cover all the ships that normally pass through this waterway. For that area we’d need to station 15-20 ships. And even then, no missile defense is 100%. The mullahs in Iran will burn every Houthi in the ME if it advances the mullah’s goals. One way or another, eventually we have to confront Iran directly with severe consequences to them. The history of it says they’ll back off.
The other point is that in the Taiwan situation, it’s likely our ships would be at standoff range. Not in a straight that narrows to almost nothing (from the standpoint of a carrier). That helps a lot. Even so, there’s a serious chance we could lose a carrier. Deal with it. How many carriers and battleships did we lose in WW2?
So? Tell the Sunnis they get to help kill Shia.
G-Captain report (today):
https://gcaptain.com/grain-ship-arrives-yemen-houthi-attack-concerns-mount-over-rubymar-fate/
Stephen Cotton, General Secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), the leading union organization for seafarers, said the Rubymar attack should be a wake up call “to immediately prioritize seafarers’ safety, before we see human lives lost on the Red Sea.”
He said an immediate, permanent Gaza ceasefire was a critical step to guaranteeing safe transit through the Red Sea.
Cotton needs to get the cotton out of his brain. If Iran gets anywhere near to what it wants, the same damn thing will happen the next time they want something. Like tomorrow.
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