We can barely build FFGs, to say nothing of bigger drone carriers that would still be dwarfed by aircraft carriers.
So you'd say, OK, what drones can we launch from the tiny fiberglass-hulled small craft that we can build lots of, but the issue is that such drones will be very small and will necessarily have ineffectively small payloads to suit.
> Honest question, is this required of belligerents? How is a submarine even meant to provide such aid?
No, it is not. Otherwise the U.S. committed several more war crimes for each of the other Iranian navy ships that were sunk by bombs or cruise missiles rather than by submarine-launched torpedoes.
International law (including treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory) require belligerents to attempt to rescue survivors if possible without putting the rescuing ship at undue risk. ‘[a]fter each engagement, Parties to the conflict shall, without delay, take all possible measures to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled’. (emphasis added for clarity)
> Otherwise the U.S. committed several more war crimes for each of the other Iranian navy ships that were sunk by bombs or cruise missiles rather than by submarine-launched torpedoes.
I am having difficulty parsing your reasoning here. What matters is were "all possible measures taken to search for and collect the shipwrecked", not the manner of the attack. You may be implying that bombs/cruise missiles left no possibilities but that isn't a certainty if there were US ships in the vicinity.
Regarding your provided reference to it being "difficult" for submarines to collect shipwrecked survivors - the treatment seems cursory and more germane to conflicts where there is more parity. In this situation what was the risk to the submarine? Exposing it's positions to the Iranians who had not other ships in the area (and per US assertions no other Navy at all)? Coming under attack from a missile launched from Iran while surfaced?
> > Otherwise the U.S. committed several more war crimes for each of the other Iranian navy ships that were sunk by bombs or cruise missiles rather than by submarine-launched torpedoes.
> I am having difficulty parsing your reasoning here. What matters is were "all possible measures taken to search for and collect the shipwrecked", not the manner of the attack.
Indeed. And modern submarines have nil ability to search for and safely collect the shipwrecked. Multiple submarines from at least 3 countries have fired torpedoes to sink enemy ships since WW2. None have ever stuck around to look for survivors, let alone surfaced to try to rescue them.
> You may be implying that bombs/cruise missiles left no possibilities but that isn't a certainty if there were US ships in the vicinity.
No, I'm pointing out the opposite: the U.S. does have assets that could have been sent from the Persian Gulf to execute a rescue operation for the Iranian sailors shipwrecked by their warship being attacked by bombs or cruise missiles.
If nothing else, a helo could "drop a life raft", as some of the other comments seem to think is easy for a submarine to do.
But no such attempt at this was made, and no one seems to have any issue with that (for obvious reasons... my point is that the same obvious reasons extend to the submarine attack).
> the treatment seems cursory and more germane to conflicts where there is more parity
Parity doesn't really factor in, it's not something you'll see in international law. You're not supposed to have to put yourself at risk to effect a rescue. The requirement to take all possible measures applies whether its two peers fighting or David and Goliath.
The fact that you think it's cursory just tells me you don't understand submarine operations, but that's OK, most don't.
> In this situation what was the risk to the submarine?
Conducting a surfaced rescue is inherently risky to the crew of a modern submarine. Unlike surface ships, there is no keel to improve station-keeping while surfaces. The hull is shaped for hydrodynamics, not for the ability to be navigated on foot by the crew. There are no davits to launch or recover boats or life rafts. There is no hanger deck or brig or sickbay or really any empty space to hold survivors. There are not extra crew onboard to guard survivors and thereby keep the submarine (and its nuclear reactor) safe.
Even aside from Mother Nature, there was an Iranian sister ship nearby who could have attacked the submarine had she surfaced (she wasn't attacked because she opted to stay behind in a neutral port rather than put to sea but it was the same port Dena had sailed from before her attack). And again, unlike during World War 2 there's no real provision to do a "crash dive" to quickly submerge (and that's even assuming the submarine captain is willing to kill the members of his crew that are topside in order to quickly submerge). A surfaced submarine is a sitting duck, militarily.
I know it may feel to you like Iran has no military assets but even a single helicopter with a lightweight torpedo (and Iran operates at least 8) would be enough to have put the submarine at serious risk of hull loss with the deaths of all crew. The Chinese have anti-ship ballistic missiles. Iran has ballistic missiles that can reach to Diego Garcia.
Iran also has submarines which may have been deployed to the area (even one of their "midget" submarines had deployed to India in 2014) and if present could easily have conducted a counterattack which the American submarine would have had difficulty detecting ahead of time, since sonar is fairly useless while surfaced.
No sane submarine captain from any country's navy operating nuclear-propelled attack submarines would have done anything different regarding survivors. A modern nuclear submarine is a glass cannon, avoiding counter-detection is basically its only means of defense, and even if that weren't the case they are not equipped to take on passengers, they have enough trouble handling their own crew, who have to share bunks because of the lack of space onboard.
> And modern submarines have nil ability to search for and safely collect the shipwrecked.
A definitive reference that was more conclusive on this point as well as your extensive further assertions would be helpful. I have no expertise in submarines and I apologize if it seemed otherwise (but I did stay in a Holiday Inn last night!) but you've not laid out your bona fides to be able to make these proclamations either.
> Parity doesn't really factor in, it's not something you'll see in international law. You're not supposed to have to put yourself at risk to effect a rescue.
Sure, I was commenting on the reference you provided being targeted to situations where there was more risk and not directly addressing a similar situation as to what occurred here.
> Conducting a surfaced rescue is inherently risky to the crew of a modern submarine.
You could argue there is risk to any vessel, not just submarines, using the examples you have provided later on yet GCII Article 18 still requires you to do it.
The best argument for there being no possibility for a war crime is one that focuses on the inability of the submarine to assist at all in a rescue. An ironclad example would be with a peace-time situation involving a ship of one's own navy that was in significant distress.
This is for discussion's sake - I don't really believe that there would actually be a war crime trial around this one incident even if it were a surface vessel that did the sinking.
> They could have surfaced (remember, it was KNOWN that there was no threat)
It was by no means "KNOWN" that there was no threat. A modern submarine is inherently in a much more unsafe posture when surfaced, which is precisely why they never do that, especially when it's possible to encounter an enemy.
> tossed out a few inflatable life rafts.
Why do you think submarines randomly carry inflatable life rafts? If they had enough space for those they'd toss them overboard and load additional food stores instead.
Moreover, a surfaced submarine close enough to a floating group of survivors is actually dangerous to those survivors. It has a rotating screw at the back which can seriously injure or kill people and it's not like there's a deck trebuchet equipped to lob life rafts at a distance, even if it carried them.
> Exactly this was one of the charges against Admiral Doenitz at Nuremberg.
Indeed, however despite being convicted of that and other charges, this particular charge was not factored into his sentence, precisely because British and U.S. submarines also engaged in the same practice during the conflict.
And that was with WW2-era submarines which were designed to operate mostly on the surface and could make provision for doing things like picking up downed aviators and engaging in "crash dives" to rapidly submerge.
Modern submarines are designed to operate mostly submerged and have very poor station-keeping while surfaced, and even lack the ability to crash dive (because you're supposed to be submerged long before you get into the danger zone and then stay submerged throughout).
It was proven in court that even the Nazi German submarines made good faith efforts to rescue drowning sailors, and they only stopped when one u-boat was sunk (or damaged?) by a US plane while it was rescuing US sailors (after which, the German navy gave out orders forbiding the practice).
> Everything I said in my previous 2 posts stands.
It was wrong before and still wrong though.
For example, you haven't explained why you feel that a torpedo for an Iranian warship in international waters is a war crime, but sinking Iranian warships at the pier in Iranian waters is not.
The U.S. did even less for shipwrecked survivors in the latter case than in the former. Why are bombs and cruise missiles to sink ships from destroyers 800 nm away not also war crimes in your mind?
Is it also a war crime when Ukraine sinks Russian navy ships at their piers with USVs or cruise missiles with no ability to recover survivors? (Hint: no, it's not)
I have explained why, multiple times. You just don't want to accept it (fine, this will be determined at Nuremberg 2,0, not by you or me, here)
The sub knew it was clear of any Iranian guns, for over 100 miles in every direction, once it had sunk the only (unarmed) Iranian asset within 100 miles of it. Thats not the same as being within (or close to) Iranian territory.
Hence, the lack of threat, as per the established laws of naval warfare, neccesitate some attempt at helping survivors. The sub was in the immediate vicinity of the ship. Not 800 miles away firing a cruise missile.
To still maintain that, even in that situation, there's still some theoretical threat means that you're effectively trying to say that in NO conceivable situation do the established laws of naval warfare apply, in practical terms. For anyone, anywhere, ever.
In any case, this is all an academic exercise. In this world order, no laws - international, military, or common decency - apply to the US or its chosen allies.
Justice will have to be served the old fashioned way.
This is a rare case of an HN discussion on international law where there is something approximating an RFC that we can just go consult on these issues --- it's the San Remo Manual, which is trivially Googlable, and consists of a series of numbered paragraphs. Cite the paragraphs that support the argument you're making about the unacceptability of sinking a flagged enemy warship simply because the attacker knows it to be unarmed.
Are you deliberately trying to misrepresent what I have said across multiple posts? The war crime was not the sinking of the ship.
That was a cowardly act (unarmed vessel), but not strictly a war crime.
The ACTUAL war crime was the immediate refusal to render any aid to the sunken sailors. How many times do I have to repeat that line? Shall I bold it for you? And the fact that the ship was ALONE and UNARMED removed any pretence that the US sub would have been in danger by doing so.
I repeatedly mention the Geneva Convention & the fact that the same principle is written into the official US naval doctrines (so its US law as well), and yet you're still barking up the wrong branch.
If you're going to refute my argument, then please refute my ACTUAL argument, and not the strawman version you've concocted.
> ACTUAL war crime was the immediate refusal to render any aid to the sunken sailors. How many times do I have to repeat that line?
Where possible. That restriction doesn't seem to have applied to submarines since WWII.
Repetition doesn't make right.
> ALONE and UNARMED
Doesn't change that it's a warship. Like, should warships from now on just say they aren't armed, then go off an engage in military operations and complain about war crimes afterwards?
I'll add this: the way you've argued this has taken me from being sceptical about this being a war crime to feeling confident it is not.
The guys on the Iranian warship also knew they were on a warship. I mean come on. What’s the expectation here. This isn’t tag on a kindergarten playground. People are gonna die.
Dönitz's blanket order that no submarine should ever pick up survivors is absolutely not equivilant to any individidual submarine deciding not to pick up survivors because {reasons}.
The first is a blanket order to ignore all survivors all the time,
the second is a specific case of not picking up survivors under a general umbrella of picking up survivors save for when there are other factors.
In this specific instance they can argue, should it ever go before an international tribunal, that they lacked room and that more applicable search and rescue was already en route.
I'm not arguing in defence of Hegseth et al. but I am pointing out that things are not nearly as clear cut and straighforward as you claim.
None of that changes that it was an Iranian warship.
Warships of nations involved in armed conflict are always valid targets for the adversary.
Otherwise it would also have been a bunch of war crimes for the Iranian ships destroyed at the pier by cruise missile or bombs.
India was not a party to the conflict so they can't vouch for the unarmedness of a warship on either side one way or another. But even if they could, unarmed warships are valid targets for the reason the other commenter pointed out (they can quickly become armed).
Nor does international law necessarily require a warship to personally pick up all survivors, and in fact gives warships a fair amount of leeway to consider their own security along with their own ability to execute a successful rescue and successfully berth the shipwrecked.
Modern submarines, while not exempt, tend to fall into that proviso more than other classes because they are not equipped to conduct surface rescue (unlike WWII-era submarines they don't even have a keel for surfaced stationkeeping), have no brig facilities, have no sickbay and very little other medical facilities.
Once it was clear that the Sri Lankan navy (the closest ships to the Dena's survivors) was responding, the responsibility of the U.S. to see to rescue had been accomplished.
`-` is the traditional shell way to refer to stdin/stdout (as with your git commit example) but also the traditional way to refer to the last directory you were in (as with git checkout/switch).
You would never pipe the output of a command to `cd` so the `-` shortcut couldn't be helpful to cd as-is. So rather than invent yet another shortcut to memorize for `cd` they reused the existing one which otherwise would be redundant, which I appreciate at least.
But git is simply being consistent with the shell to further reduce the cognitive complexity of reusing shell commands you're used to in analogous git contexts.
Honestly this isn't even the first time this kind of advice has been given to non-DoD users needing to access a DoD service over commercial means.
The Navy a few years back were experimenting with letting users check basic HR things in their service record (e.g. to request days off) and despite the leadership's stated intent being for Sailors to be able to do this on their actual personal mobile devices, the IT people duly signed all the relevant server certs under the DoD PKI "because policy forces us to", and then cooked up user training guides that patiently explained to Sailors how to bypass security warnings in their browser.
So if nothing else at least there's experience to go by here, ha.
> Is this actually all the way technically correct? As far as I know, there is no requirement that the trust chains for server certificates and client certificates are in any way related. It seems to me that it would be perfectly possible for the DoD to use its own entirely private client certificate infrastructure but to still have the server certificate use something resembling an ordinary root certificate.
I think you're right that it's possible in principle for a Web server to enforce use of DoD CAC (enforcing the client cert being in the DoD PKI) without itself using a DoD PKI cert on the server side.
That said there's little benefit to it, users who haven't jumped through hoops to install DoD root CA certs won't typically be able to get their browsers to present them to the remote server in the first place, and if we're willing to jump through those hoops then there's no good reason for the DoD server not to have a DoD PKI cert.
I've never used one of the DoD smartcards, but I can certainly imagine the DoD wanting a user of one of these smartcards to be able to use it with a COTS client device to authenticate themselves.
Sure, people do that all the time. After they run "InstallRoot" to install DoD root certs on their COTS device, that is. I'm honestly not sure any major browser will allow you to use a client smartcard without having the smartcard's certificate chain to the trust store used by the browser so this part seems unavoidable.
FWIW I just tested it and yes you can run a web server using a commercial server cert that enforces client PKI tied to the client having a DoD PKI cert. It works just fine.
> I'm honestly not sure any major browser will allow you to use a client smartcard without having the smartcard's certificate chain to the trust store used by the browser so this part seems unavoidable.
It’s been a while, but I’ve used file-backed client certs issued by a private CA in an ordinary browser without installing anything into the trust store, and it worked fine. I don’t see why a client cert using PKCS11 or any other store would work any differently. Why would the browser want to verify a certificate chain at all?
I'm really just talking about the browser trusting the user cert itself. I've done the softcert thing myself before, I forget if it used commercial root CA or not but it did work.
I guess you could flag the leaf (user) cert as ultimately trusted and that should be fine, but if the browser doesn't see that trust notation, and does see an intermediate CA, it's going to try to pull that back to a trusted root.
One way or the other the user will have to fiddle with browser settings to make a CAC work, either to tell the browser to trust their cert explicitly, or to have the browser trust DoD certs.
> Like, why on earth would I spent hours reviewing your PR that you/Claude took 5 minutes to write?
If the PR does what it says it does, why does it actually matter if it took 2 weeks or 2 minutes to put together, given that it's the equivalent level of quality on review?
One reason: if it takes 2 minutes to put together a PR, then you'll get an avalanche of contributions of which you have no time to review. Sure, I can put AI in fron to do the review, but then what's the point of my having an open source project?
> but then what's the point of my having an open source project?
For some people, the point was precisely to improve the software available to the global commons through a thriving and active open source effort. "Too many people are giving me too many high-quality PRs to review" is hardly something to complain about, even if you have to just pick them randomly to fit them in the time you have without AI (or other committers) to help review.
If your idea of open source is just to share the code you wanted to work on and ignore contributions, you can do that too. SQLite does that, after all.
> If the PR does what it says it does, why does it actually matter if it took 2 weeks or 2 minutes to put together, given that it's the equivalent level of quality on review?
You're right that the issue isn't how many minutes it took. The issue is that it's slop. Reviewing thousands of lines of crappy code is unpleasant whether they were autogenerated or painstakingly handcrafted. (Of course, few humans have the patience and resistance to learning to generate the amount of terrible code that AIs do routinely).
> but not everyone’s open source projects are meant as a gift to the world for anyone and everyone to use
How is that open source then? There's a reason they added the "no discrimination against persons or groups" and "no discrimination against fields of endeavor" clauses when OSI came up with the open source definition in the 90s. https://opensource.org/osd
"Anyone and everyone" was always part of the gig if you wanted to release something as actual open source.
If you wanted to wrote proprietary source-available software you always had that choice. Likewise with Free Software's copyleft.
Fair point! I was conflating source-available and open source.
I guess you cannot limit based on user or use case, but you can set rules on attribution and copyleft in OSS, both of which aren’t respected by AI. Still seems different than a no strings attached gift.
Yes, I think there's a range between 'give it away I don't care what happens after' (public domain) to the "just cite me bro" (BSD/MIT style) and farther into the full copyleft where you have rights to see and modify the source but also obligations if you redistribute from there.
AI can't follow all the rules across that range, but GPL-style licenses can also be hard to show infringement of even confined only to humans, which is one reason why you see things like encoding license onto module boundaries in projects like the Linux kernel.
Even there, something like io_uring might be GPL but if I use the same techniques to build my library around a send/receive queue concept, as an AI might generate, is it still copyright infringement? I would argue it's never really been the open source model to prevent developers from reimplementing architectural styles or approaches (that's the logic of proprietary software authors), they've instead been after protecting their specific distributable libraries and applications.
These are dicey questions even outside of AI, AI just brings them front and center because the linkage between training data and generated output seems more direct. But humans do also learn the same way, by studying source code when possible, even if they later write something from scratch you can't go and unlearn what you've learned.
So you'd say, OK, what drones can we launch from the tiny fiberglass-hulled small craft that we can build lots of, but the issue is that such drones will be very small and will necessarily have ineffectively small payloads to suit.
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