Sounds to me that they put the wrong coordinates for the refueling into the GPS and were off course by miles before they realized the mistake. It was just a routine trip so they were skylarking and not alert in the navigation. Shooting up the Iranians would just have made things worse. The OinC is going down along with the senior enlisted. I was the xo and navigator of a navy ship and can well imagine a routine passage gone wrong due to multiple human and mechanical problems.
Look at the report. Everything is in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
Why not in local time?
GMT doesn’t mean anything to most people. They are trying to obfuscate the time this happened.
Anybody here remember the time difference between ZULU and GMT for this location?
I can almost (not quite) feel how the OIC felt in the moment he realized he was in the wrong place, and those Iranian light boats were bearing down on him. The sudden realization that you've screwed up beyond all comprehension.
At that point, his options were very limited. A more ballsy guy might have just made a run for it, but he probably decided that he didn't want to be responsible for perhaps making a bad situation worse. So, he did whatever was necessary to end it quickly. Probably thought the worst result would be if shooting started, and someone on either side was killed because of his error.
I might have been inclined to run for it, but I can't fault him for deciding not to fight it out.