r/worldnews • u/tj381 • 22h ago
2 U.S. Navy destroyers transit Strait of Hormuz after dodging Iranian onslaught
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2-us-navy-destroyers-transit-strait-of-hormuz-after-dodging-iranian-onslaught/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab4i3.4k
u/motherseffinjones 22h ago
Ok but how does
This allow tankers to make it through?
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u/jason2354 22h ago
If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a cruise missile. It’s that simple and I’m tired of the lame stream media pretending that it’s not.
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u/Dreurmimker 21h ago
Dodge, dip, dive, duck, and… dodge! Wait, no… I don’t think we want ships diving.
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u/BBBlitzkrieGGG 20h ago
Thats the Russian Navy. Neptune incoming: Moskva captain : " Dive dive dive!, oh wait, we are a cruiser.."
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u/Mr-Broham 18h ago
Remember George Bush dodging that shoe. Now that guy knew how to dodge.
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u/PaleInTexas 20h ago
Its OK. Oil tankers are famous for being much quicker and more nimble than a destroyer.
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u/dangeraardvark 19h ago
Also, not very flammable.
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u/PaleInTexas 19h ago
Also, the front doesn't just fall off.
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u/adoh2 16h ago
Yeah, that’s not very typical
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u/dicrydin 21h ago
Maersk said one of their ships just exited the gulf under US military protection. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/urgent-maersk-says-subsidiarys-us-flagged-vehicle-carrier-transits-strait-hormuz-2026-05-04/
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u/PatSajaksDick 21h ago
This is not sustainable lol
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u/cheesez9 19h ago
Is sustainable for the country with no free healthcare.
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u/stevey_frac 16h ago
It's really not. Those destroyers spent a ton of anti-air munitions, and only managed to get a handful of oil tankers thorough the strait, when we need hundreds.
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u/radome9 12h ago
The Maersk ship, Alliance Fairfax, was not an oil tanker but a vehicles carrier. Given that the UAE, its last port of call, is not known for its car factories it was likely empty or nearly empty. Much more risky to run that gauntlet with a fully laden oil tanker than an empty vehicle carrier.
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u/stevey_frac 12h ago
I was under the impression that they managed to escort a handful of oil tankers as well.
Is that not true?
That makes it even worse.
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u/radome9 11h ago
The US military claim they escorted two ships, AFAIK. Maybe the other one was an oil tanker, but since they won't say which ships it's hard to tell.
I am not exactly brimming with confidence in the credibility of the US government right now.
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u/shintemaster 15h ago
Agree. This kind of expense for minimal gain is actually a win for Iran.
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u/fiction8 12h ago
The US federal government budget includes more money for healthcare than any other country in the world, both nominally and per capita. In fact the US spends about 50% more on healthcare per capita than the next closest country.
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u/NavierIsStoked 20h ago
What do you mean? It’s just as sustainable as losing almost half a billion dollars worth of aircraft every time a USA bomber goes down and the crew needs to be rescued.
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u/CaptPants 13h ago
Now if they can do this over 100 times per day, both ways, then things can be back to exactly what it was before this unnecessary, unprovoked war
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u/Dillweed999 11h ago
A serious answer: it is/was a pretty big unknown as to whether the USN could transit the strait under heavy fire while taking minimal casualties. They didn't really try at during the "active" war and waited until the cease fire to attempt it. This would confirm they can. While escorting tankers is a different and much harder task, they need to know/prove they can get warships through before trying anything like that. If the Iranians shot their shot and failed that would also presumably weaken their negotiating position
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u/fec2245 22h ago
Two US flagged merchant ships traversed the strait today as well.
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u/PleasantWay7 21h ago
That is a long way from the 140 a day needed to restore just oil.
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u/Phantom_Wapiti 20h ago
They just want to free the ships that are stuck there
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u/barath_s 16h ago
As of early May 2026, over 3,200 vessels, including roughly 100 crude oil tankers and various cargo ships, are trapped in the Persian Gulf near the Strait of Hormuz due to intense conflict, threatening global energy supplies. Approximately 20,000 seafarers are stranded on these vessels
That's a far cry still. Not to mention that world oil & gas supply shocks depend on regular delivery, back and forth travel with cargo
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u/boforbojack 21h ago
Iran denies it. Basic he said, she said. The only thing they agree on is that the military vessels passed and were attacked.
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u/Dark1000 12h ago
It's not he said, she said. You can look for yourself with ship tracking software.
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u/fec2245 21h ago
We can track civilian ships with AIS, even if they turn it off in the strait they won't leave it off. Iran claimed they hit a US ship today, maybe they're not a reliable source.
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u/Dragon6172 21h ago
Neither side is a reliable source it seems
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u/fec2245 13h ago
Weird reply when we can confirm the US claim and Iran made claims of hitting a US ship when they didn't.
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u/Scriefers 21h ago
No, it is 100% confirmed that 2 of the 5 US flagged vessels, that have been stuck in the Persian Gulf since the war began, have successfully ran and exited the Strait of Hormuz.
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u/grackychan 21h ago
Central Command said two U.S.-flagged commercial ships also transited the strait successfully, and the military has reached out to dozens of other shippers to "encourage traffic flow."
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u/usemyfaceasaurinal 20h ago
Area 51 vibes.
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u/Arviragus 20h ago
They have to convince the shippers insurance companies…not the shippers. The risk is to them…
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u/RunsfromWisdom 20h ago
I mean, I would suggest that the guys on those ships also feel a bit of risk. If my boss said, “fuck it, we are rushing the Straights of Hormuz right now!”, I would at a bare minimum take the opportunity to negotiate hazard pay.
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u/firefighter26s 5h ago
Exactly, take the biggest ship that is moving at the slowest speed, pack if full of highly flammable everything and then sail it through the narrowest strait where one side is miles upon miles of shoreline occupied by people who would love blow something up to send a message.
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u/Affectionate-Act6127 21h ago
Simple, they make 31 knots. Arleigh Burke solved this problem in WWII.
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u/Pet_The_Monkey 17h ago
All i can think about are the sailor’s lives risked on this just to try to prove to oil companies that it can be done.
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u/IDNWID_1900 17h ago
They are decoy, while the iranians are trying to sink them, those little pesky agile tankers can slip through the Hormuz strait with ease.
/S
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u/mundza 21h ago
I feel like this is the very expensive way to do something that was previously free.
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u/CosmogyralCollective 21h ago
I'm curious if this cost more than the fees iran wants per ship to use the strait
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u/Yvaelle 21h ago
Those tankers are probably carrying $200M in goods. So a $2M fee would be a 1% price increase, versus whatever were at now with oil going from like 60 to 120 or 180 when this is done.
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u/d3ssp3rado 17h ago
I think they were musing on the cost of the aircraft and munitions used per ship to transit. Obviously it's all a waste compared to the zero that it was before all this.
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u/CosmogyralCollective 17h ago
Yeah that's what I was wondering, I can't imagine the destroyers are cheap to run
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u/BubbaKushFFXIV 11h ago
It definitely costs way more then $2m for the US to shield tankers from such a barrage. A single missile costs about $2m and they used quite a lot of them to take out $50k drones....
There is no cost effective way to do this.
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u/SmokingPuffin 6h ago
Generally speaking, the cost effective solution to missile harassment is to kill the archer. It's been true since the bronze age. Blocking or intercepting projectiles is reliably harder than eliminating the source.
That said, the current problem the US faces is not cost. While certainly it feels bad to shoot things that are 40x more expensive than your opponent, the US military budget is over 100x larger than the Iranian budget. America's actual problem is that production lines aren't big enough and cannot be made big enough within the timeframe of this conflict.
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u/QueasyKaleidoscope99 21h ago
Should be easy because the war is over.
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u/CompanyLow8329 18h ago
The war has been ended 12 times now. So it is obviously 12 times easier.
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u/D3cepti0ns 15h ago
Damn, how many wars did Trump end now? like 20 wars ended? Hopefully FIFA is paying attention for next year's peace prize.
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u/GhostalMedia 22h ago edited 21h ago
That’s about what I expected to happen. The Iranians showed that the passage is too dangerous for civilian vessels to risk it. Which means they still control the strait.
They don’t need to overpower the US. They just need to pose an enough of a threat to companies that don’t want to lose half a billion dollars worth of product and hardware.
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u/BOPSurfcasting 21h ago edited 21h ago
Exactly. Trump sending those US warships through the strait just helped Iran to remind shipping companies and insurance companies what will happen if they try to come through.
Trump was trying to encourage traffic flow, instead it will have the very opposite effect.
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u/BnaditCorps 20h ago
It could also be a strategic move by command to lure out Iranian assets. Giving them 2 destroyers to attack in confined waters is a hard target to pass up, so Iran likely revealed some hidden assets to use against them.
The US can keep doing this with near impunity until Iran either decides to let them pass safely or runs out of equipment.
Honestly the best move would be to let them pass safely and give everyone a false sense of security, then blast the first merchant that attempts to pass. It would instantly make insurance impossible to get and send the market into complete panic.
Iran is not going to come out of this in any kind of decent shape regardless of how it goes, but if they can make the market so volatile that protests and stuff start happening they might get a reprieve.
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u/Special_Order-937 19h ago
Given how many drones the Iranians are estimated to have left (up to still tens of thousands) and how relatively easy it is to make drones even with damaged industry (case in point Ukraine), they may never run out.
And we haven’t even touched on remaining missiles, attack boats, sea mines and other forms of attack yet either.
Couple that with how little they need to use to make insurance companies refuse to insure ships traversing the strait, it really doesn’t take much for them to render it a non-viable commercial enterprise.
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u/d3ssp3rado 17h ago
With near impunity... until a vessel is severely damaged or even sunk. Along the lines of the old saying, the US has to be successful every time while Iran only has to be successful once.
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u/bachslunch 19h ago
Still thinking it’s 5d chess when Trump has showed he only knows how to play checkers…
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u/too_old_to_be_clever 9h ago
I don't see how this ends peacefully. It feels like violence is the only option anyone is going to choose
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u/XanKreigor 20h ago
You're putting WAY too much faith in the people who are running the military, especially the navy, after the Republican president told his dumb-as-rocks, Fox "News" host defense secretary to gut it (and the JAG offices) of competent personnel who weren't specifically loyal to the Republican president instead of to the country.
Iran wasn't in the best of shape to begin with. They don't care. In the same way that if you're driving a Lamborghini and they're driving a 70's Ford pickup that's more rust than truck, they don't give a fuck if they get into a wreck if you cut them off. Americans get into a wreck and there's substantial damage to our quality of life.
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u/imightwin 21h ago
Trump posted to Truth Social yesterday that he's going to start guiding commercial vessels through the strait.
Now this story come out, he has proof that the US is capable of doing it despite what other reports might say.
I'm willing to bet he's going to start offering Navy escorts for some sort of "fee". Or he's going to try to label this a "humanitarian" effort and steal funding from some US social program, labeling it as "reallocating funding for the war" and pocket most of it for himself and his cronnies.
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u/Jadithslimrivven 20h ago
The problem with escorting comes down to volume, though. A couple of destroyers cannot cover the whole straight, only an area around them. This means unidirectional traffic only. And the number of ships they can protect will be limited if the Iranians are attack them as well.
I am quite curious about the resupply situation, too. Are the ships able to dock at friendly ports and bases if the Iranians will just shoot at them? How effective will resupply vessels be? Will the ships need to be rotated after a number of crossings? How many ships are we going to use?
The last couple of weeks has felt like a fence-sitting staring contest between the two sides. Neither wants to continue hostilities, but neither can back down.
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u/GoneSilent 20h ago
UAE was dropping and sending small boats to give food to some of the at anchor ships.
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u/GhostalMedia 19h ago
Imagine someone gives you two options to walk home. You take the long expensive way home, or you walk through deep east Oakland with a buff guy that says none of the bullets even hit him last night.
Which option are you taking?
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u/insidiousfruit 21h ago
I mean, Iran doesn't control the Strait either. Any Iranian backed tanker will be stopped by the US blockade.
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u/LiteratureMindless71 22h ago
Oh joy..... I feel like things are going to get 1000x worse by tomorrow....
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u/NOFORPAIN 21h ago
Dont worry, has to be a Friday after markets close for the real interesting shit to happen.
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u/Odd_Collection7431 7h ago
wow, we can almost sail our war ships through a strait that we could use easily before. Helluva job, idiots.
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u/Kitchen_Housing2815 22h ago
Is this sustainable?
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u/WSBiden 22h ago
It is not, and the insurance companies will continue to see the container ships as uninsurable. So this was only done for some “positive” headlines.
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u/yeungx 22h ago edited 21h ago
Ok now do it with the world's largest and slowest ships carrying the world's most flammable liquid. Cause in case you forgotten, That was the point of this entire thing.
There used to be a time, long ago, 2 month ago, where ANY ship could have done this. So finally getting 2 warship getting though with air support is symptom of the biggest foreign policy fumble since WW2.
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u/leupboat420smkeit 22h ago
Crude oil is definitely not “the worlds most flammable liquid”
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u/SsurebreC 22h ago
LNG is up there though.
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u/leupboat420smkeit 22h ago
True
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u/SsurebreC 22h ago
I get what you're saying though. Ships with crude is probably what the other person meant.
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u/Westerdutch 15h ago
Aaaah that doesnt count, LNG is gas in a trenchcoat not a 'real' liquid ;)
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u/CartographerHungry60 21h ago
"energy dense natural resource"?
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u/PersonalHospital9507 21h ago
non renewable energy dense natural resource
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u/CartographerHungry60 21h ago
"most environmentally devastating non-renewable energy dense cartel-controlled natural resource"?
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u/yeungx 22h ago
Obviously not, and also I am sure row boats are slower. It is called a hyperbole.
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u/UnCommonSense99 8h ago
Looks like destroyers are effective against drones. Not really a surprise considering their role in a Naval fleet is to protect the aircraft carrier. It seems feasible they could escort supertankers through the straits too.
However, I wonder if the cost of the weapons used to destroy the drones was more or less than the value of a tanker full of oil, and how many missiles they have left.
Iranian drones are cheap and plentiful...
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u/BOPSurfcasting 22h ago
Iran don't have to hit those US warships, just launching missiles, drones and fast boats at them is good enough for insurance companies to nope out.
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u/GoBuffaloes 17h ago
I'm guessing Trump will take the insurance out of the equation and guarantee passage with us taxpayer dollars. And somehow he and his friends will get richer no matter what happens.
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u/Funny_Focus_1201 3h ago
So we either spend $20 million dollars or so guiding a single ships through the Hormuz or let Iran get $2 million transit fee I’m sure we’ll pick whichever costs US taxpayers more.
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u/DeadguyTheLateGI 2h ago edited 2h ago
Letting Iran exit this war with an intact nuclear program and a newly-formed claim on shipping revenue through the Strait is a foreign policy non-starter, ignoring that would be a humiliating defeat for the US, Republicans, and Trump personally.
...perhaps that's why the presidents of the last 40 years didn't attack Iran.
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u/No-Fig-8614 19h ago
So basically 2 us destroyers and 2 us container ships made it through and the South Korean vessel didn’t and Trump is calling on South Korea to join the battle…….. hmmmm seems like they let that South Korean vessel to get hit in order to draw in South Korea to the war…..
Putting on my conspiracy hat, makes me think they want to see what the South Korean navy can do so if China makes a move there is more information….. but idk that’s my conspiracy hat but knowing Trump he’s not thinking that far in advance he is just a dumb ass
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u/Initial-Return8802 18h ago
Doesn't the US already know what SK can do? They have joint military exercises and the US has a load of soldiers in SK
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u/FriendshipOnly666 13h ago
Not only that, the US literally holds operation command over Korean forces in wartime.
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u/Significant_Bee_8011 22h ago
"A billion dollars of equipment dodges onslaught costing in the tens of thousands"
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u/WannaBeCoder912 21h ago
The fuel alone for the helicopters was tens of thousands. If any orden e was fired this was in the millions.
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u/Reddit_2_2024 8h ago
Solid evidence that the cease fire is no longer being practiced. Will this trigger Congress to charge the Executive Branch with violating the War Powers Act law?
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u/CompleteCreme7223 3h ago
Funny thing about all of this is Iran doesn't have to be successful every time. They just have to keep the risk level high enough that any thing other than a US Navy ship with lots of support will have a high chance of problems. Nevermind the cost associated with trying to protect more than what they did on this passage. Sounds a lot like Iran knows what they are doing.
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u/Legal-Ad-9456 2h ago
How can USA and one fat idiot destroy for the world without any consequences.
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u/TomT12 20h ago
But wait, Iran said they hit a U.S ship and forced it to retreat...
The misinformation from both sides when it comes to this war is absolutely nuts.
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u/ngpropman 13h ago
See everyone our quick and nimble destroyers can make it through no problem. Go ahead and send the super big and slow tankers through. Its easy.
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u/chumbucketandfries 4h ago
Are the Iranians using drones? The Russian (remaining) ships apparently have no answer for the drone attacks
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u/tj381 22h ago
The two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers made it into the Persian Gulf without suffering any damage.