I knew someone would fix it for me Eurofighter was my first guess

Here's why the story about a US Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet getting taken down in a friendly fire incident by a US Navy destroyer while engaged in anti-Houthi operations is suspect... 1/ pic.twitter.com/7yaiF6p2yD

— Brandon Weichert (@WeTheBrandon) December 22, 2024

Wild thread here.

It is pretty wild but while I do think human errors were made, the time to respond to a fast jet/rocket attack (as perceived) is really split second decision making. I am surely not knowledgeable about USN anti-aircraft/missile defenses or procedures, any more than I am about naval aviation actual flight procedures/friend-foe reliability etc, but I imagine that no one on that ship would want to be the one who 'flinched' before one of those larger missiles hit the ship/carrier group, which might have been perceived as only a couple seconds or five away (pure speculation on my part).

I'm a pretty big skeptic of DEI leadership in the pentagon period but I don't think 'horrendously inept' in this instance can be summarily concluded based on what we actually know, despite the navy's propensity to lie about past actions such as the Eisenhower near miss recently. War is ugly, and people screw up under pressure.

Again, not a defense I guess just a profession of ignorance/lack of understanding on my part.

What's the likelihood that we looking at some sort of electronic warfare incident that caused the cruiser to make the decision to launch on its own guy?

Recall that there has been incidents over the past decade where it was alleged that major collisions were caused by anomalies / user error of radar and electronic systems on board the ship in a critical moment. (Fitzgerald / McCain) and also Helge Ingstad in Norway where there was a failure to broadcast AIS at a critical moment for some unknown reason.

Food for thought.

I've personally seen gps spoofing in the med where ships were not where they were actually at.

How many lose their jobs over this?

Carrier group commander?
Fleet commander?
Chief of naval operations? (Complete dei hire anyways)


I was army so I may not be using the correct terms for the commands.

If no one was canned over Afghanistan, why would they be canned over this?

For what it's worth , know a guy who was in Norway at the time of Helge Ingstad and chatter was flying among the Norwegians about some sort of electronic anomaly.

Wouldn't surprise me. When I was with the feds we would regularly get verified incident reports of spoofing, as well as what I saw myself.

But a mariners greatest aid to navigation will always be TFW. The ****ing window.

UPDATE

I have a nephew over there on a destroyer grouped with Stockdale (not Truman) and his dad my brother tells me they're repelling hostile drones on the regular. unfriendly skies

Pick one or even two:

A. Some sort of human error occurred whereby the most advanced domain awareness system on planet earth somehow failed and resulted in shooting down a friendly aircraft returning from a mission.

B. A guided missile cruiser was exposed as being venerable to electronic warfare.

C. The Houthis (or some other unnamed actor) managed to shoot down an F-18 which demonstrates their capability to somehow thwart all systems the US and the aircraft itself has to prevent that from happening.

D. A US F-18 was shot down by the enemy and blaming it on a friendly fire incident was the least worst option under the circumstances, and for some unknown reason simply blaming it on mechanical failure on the aircraft wasn't option.

Maybe they were worried the chief of the boat installed a hidden starlink system so they couldn't keep it under wraps for long so had to make up a story quick.

But if had to pick someone least likely to crash a ship into another ship it world be the Norwegians as the world's best seafarers going back to the vikings.

Eliminatus said:

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Friendly fire, isn't your friend. Know first hand. Thankful the crew have been recovered safely. I'll be on lookout for the investigation report when it comes out.

Hard to think these things can still happen but also really shows the growing complexity of our ever changing battlespace and the increasing speed at which it moves. Human error still definitely a part of the chain here though for sure somewhere.

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must have been pretty terrifying for the pilot and navigator to hear that beeping sound as the SA Missile was streaking towards their aircraft!

I would think they had to bail out before the missile exploded.

all of this could have been avoided if we didn't have a dementia patient as the CINC the past 14 months allowing Yemen to fire missiles every day!

TWICE?! The same night a U.S. Navy jet was shot down by friendly fire, an F/A-18 Super Hornet narrowly avoided a surface-to-air missile fired from USS Gettysburg. The missile missed by just 100 feet as the jet prepared to land on the Harry S. Truman. pic.twitter.com/3gxwIbXP8V

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 24, 2024

Sounds like there was a second incident where they fired on another F-18 but missed.

I flew F-4s many years ago. I was stationed in the States, but we had a tactical nuke wartime commitment in Germany. We would deploy for 30 days per year and pull nuke alert. A group of us went TDY to Ramstein to do some strike planning. We got on the shuttle bus at base ops to go to billeting. There were some young enlisted on the bus and, being in flight suits, they asked what we did. When we told them, one replied, "hey man, I can shoot you down". They were Vulcan Chaparral gunners.

One of the local procedures was a Safe Passage Corridor. The idea was if you lost your radio, you would follow the Safe Passage procedures and not get shot down. I discussed with my buddies the scenario. The balloon goes up, we are launched to nuke some bridge in Czechoslovakia, fight our way through SAMs, MIGs, and AAA, only to get shot down on short final by our own guys who would be shooting at anything in the sky, friend or foe. .