For example, I was told -- I hinted at it in the article -- that we could have a carrier in trouble in the Straits of Hormuz. There's very little room to maneuver, and a carrier, when it's recovering planes that are, you know, landing after attacking and trying to recover the planes, their motions, their movements are predictable. They have to have the wind in a certain direction. They could be vulnerable to attack.
Well well, BUSTED SEYMORE!!!
Let me explain:
It appears that if Hersh is talking to anyone, he is talking to old, retired Military personnel, looking for attention.
The Carriers in the Gulf DO NOT have to turn into the wind to either launch or recover their aircraft. THEY ARE FAST ENOUGH TO MAKE THEIR OWN WIND, if they need to.
Carriers will still use available winds, but they don't have to. The newer Carriers are so fast that their battle groups have a hard time keeping up when they go to speed.
Hersh is either making it up, or talking to idiots not up to speed on what our current Carriers can do.
Its always nice to have an extra 25 knots blowing across the deck, because then the CAT stroke can be dialed back to just a nice push in the butt coming off the deck, but if they need to, they can crank it up to a necksnapper if the wind aint around, or like I said, they can just make the wind by doing a quick sprint.
Hersh and whoever is advising him are dopes.
I would surely like to see the PT boat that can get within 1000 yards of a Carrier without getting eaten up by a Destroyer in seconds.
It aint gonna happen, and like I said, Seymore is talking to some really old people if he thinks the Navy is worried about a stupid PT boat getting near a Carrier.
Hersh may also be spatially challenged and sees a huge air craft carrier in one part of his brain, and the "small" Persian Gulf in another part of his brain, and concludes that a carrier is constrained just by traversing the Strait of Hormuz.
Side note: the Japanese are approaching Hawaii in Tora! Tora! Tora! on AMC right now. Uh-oh, Sunday morning stateside.
Hersh and John Murtha have the same "sources"...
Those sources make them both sound like looney tunes...IF they exist.
You specifically say "in the Gulf," but I've always thought that the narrowness and shallowness of the Gulf limited what our Carriers could do in this regard. I definitely defer to your knowledge. It still concerns me, however.
Rather than the particular Hersh statement that "they have to" turn into the wind he may have taken a comment that the carrier will turn into the wind when not in combat (to minimize wear and tear on the planes, pilots and crewmen) and conflated it himself with the fantasies of an unprovoked American attack on Iran.
The nightmare scenario for me has been that they have a crude nuke or something they bought from the old Soviet Union stockpile, however crude, anchored to the bottom of the Straights of Hormuz and are waiting for a carrier group to be transiting.
During the peanut farmers time the commander of the task force in the Gulf was supposedly asked what would happen if Tehran executed the American hostages. It is said that he commented only "Tehran will have a second sunrise."
If there is a direct attack on our forces in the region I'm convinced that there will be no restraint, no argument over rules of engagement. I personally think that Hersh is right in his reporting that we are making these plans to attack Iran. Hell, we're probably making plans to attack Long Island. It's what the Pentagon REMFs do. However, I also think that these plans are being fine tuned and updated much more rapidly than normal as tensions ratchet up. We are not planning on launching an attack on Iran. We are planning a massive and decisive response to an Iranian attack on us or our allies. Kind of like a sub calling a "snapshot" torpedo launch. They hit us and we want to have a big response already laid on.