Continuity officers scored the shadow-network ships an unoriginal follow-up and the US opened fire in the Gulf of Oman
US forces struck three Iranian oil tankers after a Pentagon unit scored them too similar to 1987. Officers used a fourteen-point form on a destroyer in the Gulf of Oman. Captains said the plot had not changed.
A fourteen-point checklist lay on the chart table of a US destroyer in the Gulf of Oman on Saturday. The boxes waited for differences from earlier wars. Commanders then authorised strikes on three Iranian oil tankers that could not fill them.
Pentagon officials created a Continuity Directorate to check each new crisis against older ones. It now scores every Gulf incident before a shot is fired. They built it after fourteen near-identical tanker crises.
Capt. Mara Ellison, who runs the office, said the vessels had offered almost no variation. She spoke by radio from Tampa.
Same sea lane, same denials, same oil. We have watched this film.
The last time this plot ran was 1987. Nobody in the directorate felt obliged to spell out the comparison.
Officers on the destroyer marked the form in pencil and stopped. The tankers scored four points of difference. They needed fourteen.
Washington has hit Iranian tankers before. This time the paperwork came first.
It is a disappointing sequel in the only sense that still matters at sea. The lighting over the Gulf of Oman has not improved. The hulls look more tired. The denials arrive on the same schedule. Humanity keeps running the same reel and calling it policy. A date would do as well as a name for the earlier disaster, and 1987 still sits on the form like a stain that will not lift. The Continuity Directorate exists because someone finally noticed. Whether the notice changes anything is another question the form does not ask.
Lt. Cdr. Paul Hedges, watching from the rail, said most of the fourteen boxes stayed empty. He did not sound surprised. The sea looked the same as it had in every briefing he had sat through.
The military released video of the strikes, as it did last time. British reporting placed the ships in the Gulf of Oman. Nobody claimed the pictures looked new.
Iran will put out a statement that sounds like 1987. The form already has a box for that.
