Flashback to a time when we had a President who knew how to deal with the pirates of the umma. No we don't have to go back as far as Jefferson waging war against the Barbary pirates who were disrupting commerce.
April 14,1988 USS Samuel B Roberts was escorting oil tankers in the Persian Gulf so the Iranians would not disrupt shipping, It ran into a mine the Iranians has placed in the Gulf .The explosion ripped a 30 ft gash in the boat and injured 10 sailors.
Although a lookout saw that the ship had entered a minefield, because a few mines were floating at the surface, no one saw the mine that the ship hit. It was tethered in 250 feet of seawater and positioned just above the
Robert’s 16-foot draft, hitting two-thirds of the way down the ship, on the port side. “In a heartbeat, a single low-tech weapon had roughly halved the structural strength of a U.S. Navy warship” (pg. 127). The damage control efforts were phenomenal, which included firefighting, shoring, flood control, electrical bypassing to get gear back online, especially the fire pumps! All the training paid off, but the hellish conditions took their toll on the crew. The book took a full chapter to describe the damage from the mine, and another three chapters to describe the damage control efforts required to save the ship. It was later determined that the minefield had been laid by the Iran Ajar.
Review No Higher Honor - U. S. Naval Undersea Museum
President Reagan responded with "Operation Praying Mantis ".It turned out to be the largest naval battles since WWII .
The U.S. response was fierce. Operation Praying Mantis was the largest of five major U.S. Navy surface actions since World War II. It was the first, and so far only, time the U.S. Navy has exchanged surface-to-surface missile fire with an enemy, and it resulted in the largest warship sunk by the U.S. Navy since WWII. In the one-day operation, the U.S. Navy destroyed two Iranian surveillance platforms, sank two of their ships, and severely damaged another.
Operation Praying Mantis (navy.mil)
There could've been more damage done except Reagan called off the attack when Joint Chiefs Chair William Crowe advised
We’ve shed enough blood for one day.”
The US attacks ,combined with renewed Iraqi ground attacks on Iran ; and the USS Vincennes downing an Iranian passenger jet that had overflown it's space exhausted Iran. They ended the war with Iraq soon after.
The US military has come under attack over 100 times since Hamas attacked
Israel. Our response has been lame. And now Iran's proxies are attacking critical commerce . It is well past time to make Iran pay a price.