Posted on 11/16/2022 6:45:19 AM PST by rktman
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — An oil tanker associated with an Israeli billionaire has been struck by a bomb-carrying drone off the coast of Oman amid heightened tensions with Iran, officials said Wednesday.
The attack on the Liberian-flagged oil tanker Pacific Zircon happened Tuesday night off the coast of Oman, a Middle East-based defense official told the Associated Press. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they did not have authorization to discuss the attack publicly.
While no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, suspicion immediately fell on Iran.
Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the head of the US Central Command, told the Wall Street Journal that Iran was behind the attack.
“This unmanned aerial vehicle attack against a civilian vessel in this critical maritime strait demonstrates, once again, the destabilizing nature of Iranian malign activity in the region,” Gen. Kurilla said.
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Newsletter email address Your email GET IT By signing up, you agree to the terms An Israeli official, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss unpublicized details of the attack, said that it appeared Iran carried out the attack with a Shahed-136 exploding drone. Iran has supplied those drones to Russia, which has been using them to target infrastructure and civilian targets in Ukraine.
“It is an Iranian attack, there is a consensus on this in the Israeli intelligence and defense community,” the official said.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesofisrael.com ...
Tonight’s presentation of Countdown to Looking Glass is brought to you by the incompetence of the Biden “administration.”
Instead, Iran attacked an oil tanker with both Israeli and Arab interests. All this will do is strengthen Trump's Abraham Accord relationship between Jews and Arabs against Iran.
Did you happen to see the first attempt to ask him about the Poland missle thing at the table with justine true-doh and other world “leaders”? Someone in the journopool shouted the question about it and he besically yelled “NO?”. Later came the actual statement. Before the cameras were declared “live”(I’m guessing) he and the others were yucking it up. Grrrrrrrr!
BiBi will address this.....(and NO, He will NOT ask Biden for permission!)
Bibi and Biden are buds. Bibi rushed to congratulate Biden when the steal was only 3 hours old. He was the voter first world leader to do so. Done with that Ivy League America hater. And when pollard the spy was released, Bibi was waiting on the ramp at the airport and hugged him. Bibi is trash.
I think everything is becoming the war of the billionaires now.
If you think Biden’s handlers support Israel or Bibi, your yardstick is broken....
Biden doesn’t support Israel. I said Bibi celebrated Biden and is an enemy of America… embracing Pollard at the airport and smiling happy and that damned traitor to America. I have no use for Bibi after he helped the 2020 steal along. He’sa backstabber
There are two astonishingly cheap asymmetric weapons that can be used even against powers like the United States. They are mines and drones. Commercial ships are even more helpless before mines and drones.
As for countermeasures, commercial drones are all built based on what the US government says they must use for control frequencies. The present “electronic guns” jam those frequencies and can bring the drones down. But it won’t take long before some grad student at Berkely has put a counter measure online so anyone can change the operating frequencies. (Ninety percent of the computer hacking attempts against one of the defense companies I worked for came from Berkely.) Also, a pre-programmed drone is probably only a year away at most.
Mines. I was program manager on OASIS, a mine sweeping device. It was cancelled by the Navy, I’m sure, because mines had become too sophisticated to be fooled by our engine noise maker and wimpy magnetic field. Your cell phone has enough smarts to tell the difference between a ship’s magnetic field and engine noise as both are really hard to replicate underwater. You can’t just put an underwater speaker on your instrument as you can’t put enough power into the water to make the right noise and combine it with the right magnetic signature to fool a mine. A mine sweeping device makes two passes, and the Navy declares the area free of mines. But now, some mines can be programmed to let two, ten, or fifty “ships” go by without detonating, then...boom!
If you wanted to bring all shipping in an area, say the Straite of Hormuz, all you’d need is a handful of smart mines. They can’t be swept. You must go down and “hunt” them. The next move will be to disguise them as rocks and then you can hunt them all day and not find them. So, forget about powerful navies and land-based missiles. All it takes to bring all shipping to a standstill is a few mines.
“Bibi and Biden are buds. Bibi rushed to congratulate Biden“
Get over it. Of course an ally of ours is going to congratulate a president after a victory. Bibi is the arguably best national leader in the world today. I’d take him for ours if I could.
That’s interesting.
I thought I knew what it means to sweep for mines, but apparently I don’t. What exactly does that mean?
“What exactly does that mean?”
A sweep consists of a device, sled, you tow behind a helicopter or boat. The sweep tries to fool the mine into thinking it is a ship. The sweep has a couple of paddles. When you drag the sled, the paddles turn simulating a ship’s propeller. (It’s about like simulating a full orchestra with a comb and some paper.) Your sled also has an electromagnet that is supposed to simulate a ship’s magnetic field. This worked on dumb mines. But a cell phone enabled mine, app courtesy of some Burkley tech type, can easily discriminate between the sound of a real ship’s propeller and a real ship’s magnetic field. You simply cannot build a device that makes the real sound of a ship’s propeller or a real ship’s magnetic field and makes those things work together as they would on a real ship. So sweeping is long gone as a working technology.
The only way to find mines is to go down and look at them. There are drones that can do that, but the ones built by BAE, the cheapest I know of, cost about $45000 each and you CAN’T bring them back on board. You have to blow them up. (Safety.) When I was up on these things, I think the US Navy had about a dozen of them in the Persian Gulf region. The Iranians had, as I recall, almost a hundred thousand mines in warehouses.
If I wanted to shut down the world’s economy, I’d drop a few dozen mines in a couple of choke points like the Strait of Hormuz, the mouth of the Red Sea, between Cuba and Florida and a couple of locations off Vietnam. (For example.) Just the fact they were there would stop all ship traffic because no ship sails or goes into port without insurance and no insurance company would underwrite the policy given the risk profile. (The preceding was for example only. The author has no intention of destroying the economy of the Western World.)
Thank you. That confirms what they would do periodically in the bay at GITMO.
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