Breaking - Iran Holding Two US Navy Boats, Detains Crews

[dogmush]

WARNING: Intra-service smack talk ahead.

Sooooo. I have actually trained with that Riverine squadron. also the one on the east coast.  Those guys (the coxswains of small craft) are barely competent sailors.  By doctrine, they are supposed to provide security for US Army Logistics Over the Shore operations.  We plan on doing that ourselves, because in the Chesapeake Bay it's 50/50 they will get there on time.  I 100% believe that navy officer that was violating the Code of Conduct: Those tool's got lost, and were picked up by the Iranian's before they could figure it out.  It's not a conspiracy, it's lowest common denominator boat handling.  We (the Army) normally know our position to within .5 NM or so.  We train, and routinely use, GPS, RDF, visual, and celestial navigation. My experience with small (read less than 300 or so ft) Navy boats, is that if it isn't on their commercial grade chartplotter, they don't know it.

Hell they couldn't even be bothered to get their uniforms on before being captured.

[RoadKingLarry]

I'll conditionally* agree with that.
And, I'll add that any lack of competence, training and proper navigation equipment is a direct reflection on the leadership, from the top down.




*Pending any real explanation of the events.

[Hawkmoon]

WARNING: Intra-service smack talk ahead.

Sooooo. I have actually trained with that Riverine squadron. also the one on the east coast.  Those guys (the coxswains of small craft) are barely competent sailors.  By doctrine, they are supposed to provide security for US Army Logistics Over the Shore operations.  We plan on doing that ourselves, because in the Chesapeake Bay it's 50/50 they will get there on time.  I 100% believe that navy officer that was violating the Code of Conduct: Those tool's got lost, and were picked up by the Iranian's before they could figure it out.  It's not a conspiracy, it's lowest common denominator boat handling.  We (the Army) normally know our position to within .5 NM or so.  We train, and routinely use, GPS, RDF, visual, and celestial navigation. My experience with small (read less than 300 or so ft) Navy boats, is that if it isn't on their commercial grade chartplotter, they don't know it.

Hell they couldn't even be bothered to get their uniforms on before being captured.

Larry's a sailor (of sailboats, not talking submarines here) so he'll probably understand this.

When I was still in high school, my uncle's boss owned a gorgeous, wood, German-made 40-foot yawl that he sailed out of a private yacht club located on Long Island Sound (that puddle between Connecticut and New York). The old man was getting too old to handle the boat himself, and his wife was too old to help, so he hired my cousin as crew for a couple of years. When my cousin moved on to bigger and better (paying) things, I was offered the job. Hmmm ... a chance to sail on the most beautiful boat I had ever seen, AND get paid for it? Yeah, I really struggled with that decision.

If you want to fire up Google maps, look up Stonington, Connecticut. We overnighted in Stonington on one jaunt, and the next morning we set off for Block Island. It was a good day, with a fair breeze, and the sail should have taken us (IIRC) a couple of hours. We sailed, and we sailed ... and we sailed, and we sailed some more ... and we weren't seeing any land. Skipper's wife had made the trip enough times that she knew we should'a been there by now. Finally, she gave me a hand signal to come down into the main cabin. She told me in no uncertain terms that she was sure her husband had messed up his navigating, and she asked me to figure out where we were, and how to get where we were going.

Back then, we didn't have GPS. Loran had been invented, but sailboats our size didn't use it. Basically, we had charts, a tide chart, a compass, and our heads. I knew what course the skipper had been steering, so I dug out the chart and the tide table, laid out a course and an estimated speed -- and I calculated that we were just over the horizon and due west from where we wanted to be, and if we kept going for about ten days we should be in Barcelona. So I worked out a new course, went back topsides and gave it to the missus, and she told her husband to make a left turn and steer the course I had worked out. He protested that he knew how to navigate, and we just needed to sail a bit longer. She told him to turn left.

We turned left, and we made harbor in about 45 minutes. (Yes, I know ... "port," not "left.")

Another time I made it the full length of Fisher's Island Sound (you'll find it just outside of Stonington Harbor) in a pea soup fog, dead reckoning from one buoy to the next.

The point being that navigation isn't all that difficult, IF you pay attention to what you're doing. With GPS, there's really no excuse for getting so lost you stray into enemy territory.

[RoadKingLarry]

I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around the level of incompetence needed for this to have gone down the way we've been told. 

[KD5NRH]

I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around the level of incompetence needed for this to have gone down the way we've been told. 

Maybe the part we haven't heard is that it was really Kerry taking Obama on a little boat trip.

[wmenorr67]

I heard/seen a report that one of them may have run out of fuel.

[dogmush]

That transit is right on the edge of their range. Depending on which route they took it could actually require refueling. Put that off too long and your drifting while someone bleeds a fuel system.

[txgho1911]

Intel for Iran.
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/01/19/centcom-sim-cards-removed-from-two-satellite-phones-before-iran-returned-two-u-s-navy-boats/
“A post-recovery inventory of the boats found that all weapons, ammunition and communication gear are accounted for minus two SIM cards that appear to have been removed from two handheld satellite phones,” reports CENTCOM.

I do not understand why they where allowed to be captured. Unless those where the sim cards they where saposed to get.

[KD5NRH]

I do not understand why they where allowed to be captured. Unless those where the sim cards they where saposed to get.

Yeah; now the Iranians are going to clone the SIM cards and call all their buddies on our dime.

[txgho1911]

I can see some comm gear onboard is throwdown - intended for normal use until capture. Whereas the comm gear on other platforms more appropriately loaded with self destruct charges / adhoc scuttling with small arms fire.

Standard HDD platters will shatter like glass. Encryption engine/sub cards would require incineration.

[KD5NRH]

Standard HDD platters will shatter like glass. Encryption engine/sub cards would require incineration.

This goes back to the size of the actual guts of memory devices; you can put a heck of a lot of encryption software on a device the size of a pinhead.  Overvoltage into the device itself, plus a few turns of nichrome wire around it, and you'd be able to reduce the whole thing to slag with a 9V battery.  Something to crush the charred remains ($2 pliers from WalMart) and scatter them off the side of the boat (hold the pliers over the water, and drop them after the crunch) should pretty well eliminate any chance of recovery.

If you wanted to go really automated, you have the "burn" button light up the device in place, then a spring loaded piston to crush it.  A fan or vibratory rig to sling the bits around afterward may not get them outside the equipment casing, but even if reconstruction was possible at that point, you should be making it take long enough that you can render any information they get obsolete before they get it.

[dogmush]

Seriously?

The US Military is not the IMF.  Messages don't burn themselves when you read them, and COMSEC security does not involve pliers, scuttling charges, or small arms fire.

[KD5NRH]

The US Military is not the IMF.  Messages don't burn themselves when you read them, and COMSEC security does not involve pliers, scuttling charges, or small arms fire.

When you're the only organization in a country with the specific mission of blowing a bunch of *expletive deleted*it up for the greater good, ignoring opportunities to blow *expletive deleted*it up for a really good reason is just wasteful.

[RevDisk]

Seriously?

The US Military is not the IMF.  Messages don't burn themselves when you read them, and COMSEC security does not involve pliers, scuttling charges, or small arms fire.

 

Wut?

I was US Army commo. All of those things were regular things we discussed. ANCDs had a removable crypto plug that could be crushed by pliers, boot or rifle butt. We trained everyone on them, plus the normal zero'ing. We had thermite grenades for destroying sensitive material, like the crypto vault or JWICS terminal (this was overseas). And there were specific rules for destroying S level hard drives. Tis how I got the Army to buy me a nice blow torch, it was in one of the manuals as accepted field decommissioning of hard drives. We didn't have hard drive shredders in theater.

We don't always burn messages, we did cross cut shred them. In the old days, yeah, they did specifically burn shredded documents. Now it's grey fuzzy dust. Which is usually burned if it was TS grey fuzzy dust.
We did train 2LT's and NCOs to burn old SOI's.


A line unit might not need or do that stuff. I assure you at the G or J level, we sure as hell did.

[Scout26]

Yeah, until it goes off by accident...  Just deep sixing and COMSEC stuff would be sufficient.

[Ben]

I'm curious that in all these latest "inventory of returned items" articles, the "confiscated" GPS units have not been mentioned. I'll defer to Dogmush, but all the gov small boats I was ever on had console mounted units similar to civilian Furunos - some the same as you can buy at the local boat store, and some with more stuff inside.

I wonder if that is what the Iraqis took, if they took anything, or if maybe they took some handheld GPS that was laying around in the cabin and used as a backup or whatever. Or maybe the boats were also carrying whatever the current version of a PLGR is?

The non-return might not be a big deal if all the Iraqis can pull from them is a boring port to port transit. I would guess there is some procedure for scheduled wipe of track history in the nav systems.

[KD5NRH]

Yeah, until it goes off by accident...

Implemented right, worst case, you're stuck with code words on clear channels.  Nobody's talking about blowing up the more-or-less-same-as-commercial transceiver, just the special bits that slot into it to make it special.

[roo_ster]

I didn't get trained in RevDisk's methods.  But we were trained how to destroy commo gear, safes, & whatnot with demo.  That was fun.  "Do NOT put hte charge under the equipment.  You'll likely just send it flying into the air.  Put the charge on top, where it will smash it into the ground."

My favorite ranges ever were demo ranges.

[dogmush]

GPS Side, we have actual civilian models, either Garmins, Furunos, or Liecas.  Then we also have DAGR's which are the new, improved PLGRs.  They are purpose built military only GPS's.  I would imagine the Riverine Command Boats run a similar set up: Commercial marine chart plotters for navigation and the DAGR's hooked up to the tactical systems(Blue force Tracker, MTS, stuff like that.)

The tactical sat coms I've used don't have SIM cards. (or at least not removable ones)  I've been issued some commercial Sat Phones that did, for unsecure coms back to shore.  They tend to either be INMARSAT or Iridium phones.  It's likely the missing SIM cards were from units like this.  The Iranians probably have a good list of which commercial numbers go to which units in the Gulf now.  I'd assume we are changing those phones out.

Rev, SOP's have changed.  We don't use ANCD's anymore. We also do very little (if any at all) classified stuff on paper, at least below BDE level.  That saves us from having to shred and burn. I don't think it's breaking any opsec to assure the internet that the comsec security plan on a 50ft, aluminium boat, doesn't involve thermite.  Ever seen Alien?

[MillCreek]

I didn't get trained in RevDisk's methods.  But we were trained how to destroy commo gear, safes, & whatnot with demo.  That was fun.  "Do NOT put hte charge under the equipment.  You'll likely just send it flying into the air.  Put the charge on top, where it will smash it into the ground."

I did not know this and I like to learn something every day.  I wonder if this would apply to nasty patients as well.

[dogmush]

 "Do NOT put hte charge under the equipment.  You'll likely just send it flying into the air.  Put the charge on top, where it will smash it into the ground."

But you know why we don't do that on boats, right?

I did not know this and I like to learn something every day.  I wonder if this would apply to nasty patients as well.

It would.  But sometimes it's good for the soul to see them fly through the air.

[Scout26]

We just had the KY 57's, 58's and 68's.  I had the KYK13 since I was the Commo officer.  In case of capture, simply zero it out and spin the knobs on the radios.


CEOI's/SOI were another matter entirely.  "Destroy by burning." 

[KD5NRH]

But you know why we don't do that on boats, right?

Ground is too far away?  Hard to run far enough before the boom?

Seems a pair of charges detonated together would do the job.  Might be hard on the hull, though.

[RoadKingLarry]

I did not know this and I like to learn something every day.  I wonder if this would apply to nasty patients as well.

That's why they make K-Y.

[dm1333]

I'm curious that in all these latest "inventory of returned items" articles, the "confiscated" GPS units have not been mentioned. I'll defer to Dogmush, but all the gov small boats I was ever on had console mounted units similar to civilian Furunos - some the same as you can buy at the local boat store, and some with more stuff inside.

I wonder if that is what the Iraqis took, if they took anything, or if maybe they took some handheld GPS that was laying around in the cabin and used as a backup or whatever. Or maybe the boats were also carrying whatever the current version of a PLGR is?

The non-return might not be a big deal if all the Iraqis can pull from them is a boring port to port transit. I would guess there is some procedure for scheduled wipe of track history in the nav systems.

You can get quite a bit of info out of a Furuno SINS, even if tracks and marks have been erased.  But it was the NTSB digging that info out, I doubt the Iranians have that level of skills.  I don't know what kind of electronics the RCB carried but the patrol craft the SWCC's and riverine guys used, that I saw, had really basic commercial nav systems.