10 Sailors Missing as USS John S. McCain Crashes Into Oil Tanker East of Singapore (VIDEO)

At the official Pacific Fleet Headlines, "USS John S. McCain collides with merchant ship near Strait of Malacca" (via Memeorandum).

"10 sailors missing" likely means "10 sailors trapped below the water line and presumed dead," but I'll update. Either way, it's unconscionable. This is like Groundhog's Day for the Navy. It's unacceptable.

Sailors and Marines Deploy from Naval Base San Diego (VIDEO)

I'm so glad the local network posts these stories. They're so important.

The family sacrifice is profound, but no complaints.

MAGA!

At ABC News 10 San Diego:

SAN DIEGO (CNS) - Sailors and Marines in the America Amphibious Ready Group and 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit left San Diego Friday for a regularly scheduled deployment. The naval force is comprised of the amphibious assault ship USS America, amphibious transport dock USS San Diego and amphibious dock landing ship USS Pearl Harbor.

During the deployment, they'll operate with embarked forces of the Camp Pendleton-based 15th MEU, the "Wildcards" of Coronado-based Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 23, and various other units...

Lookouts and Radar Spotters on the Fitzgerald Should've Seen the Oncoming Cargo Ship

This is good. Click through and RTWT.

Maritime mystery: Why a U.S. destroyer failed to dodge a cargo ship https://t.co/duoPYVY99M

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 24, 2017

President Trump Calls Commanding Officers of Navy Ships

At ABC News:

Photos show president calling commanding officers of Navy ships that launched missiles on Syria to thank them, crew. https://t.co/wdpUBeXBSA pic.twitter.com/9HLKNKpuE1

— ABC News (@ABC) April 10, 2017

Barrett Tillman, On Wave and Wing

*BUMPED.*

I love this!

Available Monday Out now, at Amazon, Barrett Tillman, On Wave and Wing: The 100 Year Quest to Perfect the Aircraft Carrier.

On Board the USS Eisenhower (VIDEO)

At London's Daily Mail, "EXCLUSIVE: 'We kill bad guys and blow up their stuff' - on board the USS Eisenhower as its Top Guns blast ISIS with bombing missions around the clock."

Also, via the Joint Forces Channel:

Crowds Flock to First-Ever 'Fleet Week' at Port of Los Angeles (VIDEO)

At LAT, "Port of Los Angeles hosts first Fleet Week."

John Prados, Storm Over Leyte

I'm overloaded with reading right now, and my fall semester's starting on the 29th, but this book looks excellent.

At Amazon, John Prados, Storm Over Leyte: The Philippine Invasion and the Destruction of the Japanese Navy.

Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia

This is a great piece.

From Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, at International Security, "Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia":

The United States has long enjoyed what Barry Posen has termed “command of the commons”: worldwide freedom of movement on and under the seas and in the air above 15,000 feet, with the ability to deny this same freedom to enemies. This command has contributed to a remarkable era of military primacy for U.S. arms against potential state rivals.

Many observers now fear that this era may be coming to an end in the Western Pacific. For more than a generation, China has been fielding a series of interrelated missile, sensor, guidance, and other technologies designed to deny freedom of movement to hostile powers in the air and waters off its coast. As this program has matured, China's ability to restrict hostile access has improved, and its military reach has expanded. Many now believe that this “A2/AD” (antiaccess, area denial) capability will eventually be highly effective in excluding the United States from parts of the Western Pacific that it has traditionally controlled. Some even fear that China will ultimately be able to extend a zone of exclusion out to, or beyond, what is often called the “Second Island Chain”—a line that connects Japan, Guam, and Papua-New Guinea at distances of up to 3,000 kilometers from China. A Chinese A2/AD capability reaching anywhere near this far would pose major challenges for U.S. security policy.

To avert this outcome, the United States has embarked on an approach often called AirSea Battle (ASB). Named to suggest the Cold War continental doctrine of “AirLand Battle,” AirSea Battle is designed to preserve U.S. access to the Western Pacific by combining passive defenses against Chinese missile attack with an emphasis on offensive action to destroy or disable the forces that China would use to establish A2/AD. This offensive action would use “cross-domain synergy” among U.S. space, cyber, air, and maritime forces (hence the moniker “AirSea”) to blind or suppress Chinese sensors. The heart of the concept, however, lies in physically destroying the Chinese weapons and infrastructure that underpin A2/AD. As Chinese programs mature, achieving this objective will require U.S. air strikes against potentially thousands of Chinese missile launchers, command posts, sensors, supply networks, and communication systems deployed across the heart of mainland China—some as many as 2,000 kilometers inland. Accomplishing this mission will require a major improvement in the U.S. Air Force's and Navy's ability to find distant targets and penetrate heavily defended airspace from bases that are either hard enough or distant enough to survive Chinese attack, while hunting down mobile missile launchers and command posts spread over millions of square kilometers of the Chinese interior. The requirements for this mission are typically assumed to include a major restructuring of the Air Force to de-emphasize short-range fighters such as the F-35 or F-22 in favor of longer-range strike bombers; development of a follow-on stealthy long-range bomber to replace the B-2, and its procurement in far greater numbers than its predecessor; the development of unmanned long-range carrier strike aircraft; and heavy investment in missile defenses and information infrastructure. The result would be an ambitious modernization agenda in service of an extremely demanding military campaign to batter down A2/AD by striking targets deep in mainland China, far afield from the maritime domains to which the United States seeks access.

ASB has thus proven highly controversial. Many observers object to its likely cost: a military program this ambitious will surely be very expensive in an era of increasingly restricted U.S. defense budgets.5 Others cite its potential for escalation: U.S. air and missile strikes against targets deep in the Chinese mainland could easily spur retaliation against U.S. or allied homelands and a possible global war against a nuclear power.

The need to incur any of these costs or any of these risks, however, turns on the underlying question of exactly how effective Chinese A2/AD can become. Many mainstream arguments, on both sides of the debate, take for granted a substantial A2/AD threat: ASB advocates would respond to this threat by battering it down; many ASB opponents would avoid it via a distant blockade of China at straits beyond A2/AD's reach; both sides tend to grant A2/AD an ability to deny U.S. access to large parts of the Western Pacific absent a massive U.S. offensive inland. Just how large a part of the Western Pacific the Chinese could close is often vague, however; many are skeptical that China can extend control all the way to the Second Island Chain, but few policy analyses have yet focused on the foundational military question of A2/AD's actual effectiveness and the range at which this capability can be expected to deny U.S. access or threaten allied shipping.

This article thus provides a more systematic assessment of the potential military effectiveness of Chinese A2/AD. We ask not whether ASB would be escalatory, but whether it is necessary. That is, to what extent will ongoing technology trends allow either side to deny freedom of movement to the other, and over what area? Will China be able to push U.S. forces far enough from its shores to threaten U.S. alliances? If so, which ones, and how gravely? And what, given this, represents the best military strategy for the United States to adopt for the long term?

To answer these questions, we focus on the long-run potential of key technologies rather than on an assessment of existing or even programmed forces, equipment, and doctrine, and we do so in the context of an extended competition between mutually adaptive peer competitors, neither of which can simply outspend the other. The A2/AD debate is mostly about the future, not the present. For now, there is little real A2/AD threat to confront: most analysts still see U.S. naval and air superiority over the Pacific except for the immediate Chinese littoral and sometimes the airspace over Taiwan. The Chinese today field only a handful of weapons with ranges anywhere near the Second Island Chain, and their military lacks experience in power projection beyond the vicinity of the Chinese coast. The chief reason for concern lies not in China's current arsenal, but in the trajectory of technical and acquisition trends whose maturation could take decades or even generations. Similarly, the ASB agenda for the United States is also mostly about the future: given the long service lives of warships, and the long lead times for developing new programs such as a stealthy long-range bomber to replace the B-2, the stakes in the A2/AD/ASB debate are mostly about the military prognosis for ten to twenty years from now, not tomorrow or next year. And by the time such major programs mature, faster-moving developments such as electronic countermeasures or tactical innovations may go through multiple rounds of adaptation, measure, and countermeasure, on both sides. The A2/AD debate is thus less about the military balance in 2016 or even 2020 than it is about the military future a generation from now, after an extended two-sided competition; below we use 2040 as a representative time frame for an environment with mature A2/AD technology on both sides.

Our focus on the long-term future motivates two critical framing assumptions. First, just as we cannot limit ourselves to today's Chinese arsenal, neither can we limit ourselves to today's Chinese military doctrine or current Chinese assumptions about the course of a war with the United States. Much can change in a generation. Perhaps Chinese doctrinal adaptation will be constrained by deep-seated cultural or historical factors, but twenty-five years of technological change will create strong incentives for doctrine to adapt, and it would be risky to assume that China will not respond. We thus focus on what technology will make possible for either side, from which we infer strategies and operational concepts that would be advisable, but we leave to others whether China will act on the incentives these changes will create.

Second, we assume that the United States cannot prevail by outspending China over this longer term. In the Cold War, the United States could do just that: a declining Soviet Union could not keep pace with Western economic growth, enabling the West to exhaust the Soviets in a protracted arms race. China, however, is not the Soviet Union: its gross domestic product is widely expected to exceed the United States' in coming years. A strategy that requires the United States to outspend a rising economic peer is unsustainable in the long run: it would simply lead to faster relative economic decline and ever-greater difficulty over time in keeping up. Calls to overwhelm Chinese A2/AD with superior expenditure are self-defeating for the time horizon at the heart of this whole debate.

Given such a long-run, two-sided assessment, we find that by 2040 China will not achieve military hegemony over the Western Pacific or anything close to it—even without ASB. A2/AD is giving air and maritime defenders increasing advantages, but those advantages are strongest over controlled landmasses and weaken over distance. As both sides deploy A2/AD, these capabilities will increasingly replace today's U.S. command of the global commons not with Chinese hegemony but with a more differentiated pattern of control, with a U.S. sphere of influence around allied landmasses, a Chinese sphere of influence over the Chinese mainland, and contested battlespace covering much of the South and East China Seas, wherein neither power enjoys wartime freedom of surface or air movement.

This finding derives from the physics of the key technologies coupled with inherent asymmetries in the operating environments of the land, air, and sea surface. Improvements in reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) technology underlie much of A2/AD's defensive potential, but RSTA effectiveness varies widely with the complexity of the background against which it must detect targets. The sky and the surface of the sea present much simpler backgrounds than the land. Land-based missiles deployed amid a complex background thus enjoy systematic RSTA advantages against airborne or sea-surface foes. As RSTA improves, land-based mobile missile launchers are likely to remain much harder to target than more-exposed aerial or surface-naval combatants of comparable sophistication. This asymmetry will make it increasingly expensive to sustain air or sea-surface operations over or near hostile territory defended by such missiles. The same underlying asymmetry, however, makes effective A2/AD control of the air or sea surface harder the farther away from a controlled landmass it must reach. For long-range RSTA, radar is essential and is likely to remain the most robust solution to the demands of sensing mobile targets over wide areas in a long-term competition. Radar, however, is inherently vulnerable as an active emitter whose physics require an unobstructed line-of-sight to the target for location information precise enough to direct weapons. Whereas mobile missiles can launch from concealment amid complex terrain, radar must reveal its location through the act of sensing. Radar can be defended, but its defenders must themselves survive preemptive attack; the farther one must operate from a friendly shoreline, the more challenging this defensive requirement becomes and the more difficult it becomes to provide the RSTA needed for A2/AD to control the air or sea surface. A2/AD's achievable reach will vary over time, but it will be especially difficult for either China or the United States to extend A2/AD's reach beyond about 400–600 kilometers from a friendly coast, a limit defined by the Earth's curvature and the physical horizon this establishes for airborne radar operating over survivable land-based protectors. Reach on this scale, however, falls far short of what either side would need to dominate a theater the size of the Western Pacific.

These findings imply that, with astute U.S. policies, A2/AD is not a decisive long-term threat to most U.S. allies in the region. Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are all either mostly or entirely beyond the likely reach of Chinese A2/AD given appropriate allied military choices. The threat to U.S. alliances often raised in the A2/AD literature can thus be mostly averted even without ASB.

Our analysis is not, however, a straightforward good-news story for the United States and its allies. Taiwan, for example, is much closer to the Chinese mainland than Japan, South Korea, or the Philippines, and it is much more exposed to a Chinese A2/AD threat that U.S. arms are unlikely to be able to preempt. Its proximity to China will not necessarily expose Taiwan to a credible invasion threat—the same technologies that enable Chinese A2/AD will enable Taiwan, with U.S. assistance, to extend its own A2/AD zone around the Taiwanese landmass in a way that would make a Chinese amphibious invasion prohibitively costly. But while Chinese military shipping would not be able to survive long enough to sustain an invasion, China could prevent Taiwanese or neutral shipping from sustaining the Taiwanese economy. The fate of Taiwan in such a contest would rest on the threat of distant blockade by the United States against Chinese seaborne trade and the relative vulnerability of insular Taiwan and continental China to trade cutoffs. If AirSea Battle could preempt Chinese A2/AD, this scenario could be avoided—but it cannot. To do so would require sustained penetration of defended airspace on a scale that A2/AD will make cost-prohibitive by 2040; it is unlikely that ASB would be able to lift a Chinese blockade of Taiwan once China deploys mature A2/AD capability.

Second, our analysis does not indicate that Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines—or for that matter Vietnam, Singapore, or even Australia and the continental United States—will be wholly invulnerable to Chinese coercion. Technological change is progressively reducing the net cost of striking fixed targets such as power plants, cities, transportation hubs, or other civilian value targets with precision-guided ballistic missiles at ever-increasing ranges. This change will not enable A2/AD-like military control at great distances from China or the landmasses of U.S. allies, but it will make a form of coercive strategic bombardment available to any state that chooses to field the needed missiles, including China. Of course, China would be vulnerable to retaliation, either in kind or from distant blockade or other means. The outcome of such coercive campaigns would be shaped by the much-discussed dynamics of resolve and stakes. The ideal solution from the U.S. standpoint, however, would be an ASB-like preemptive capacity to destroy before launch the missiles that China would use for such missions, thus averting this threat altogether. This ideal solution, however, is at odds with the nature of the relevant technological trends.

To support these findings, we proceed in six steps. First, we establish an analytical context by sketching the political and geostrategic aims that the United States and China might pursue in potential future warfare in the Western Pacific and the role A2/AD and ASB might play in such a war. Next we describe A2/AD and its technological foundations in more detail, explaining why it constitutes a uniquely important issue for U.S. strategy in the Western Pacific. We then explore some critical weaknesses inherent in these technologies, especially the vulnerability of the long-range RSTA systems on which all else rests. This analysis implies a real but limited A2/AD ability to deny freedom of movement to an opponent. Next we consider the potential of ASB to deny China such a real-but-limited A2/AD capability; we reject this ambition as unachievable without sustained expenditures that would exceed China's. We conclude by summarizing key points and developing in greater detail their implications for policy and scholarship...

More at that top link.

Hague Tribunal Rejects Beijing's Claims to South China Sea (VIDEO)

Heh.

At the WSJ, "China Digs In Heels After Tribunal Rules Against Sea Claims":

SHANGHAI—This was the humiliating result that China feared most: A small country, the Philippines, took on and comprehensively defeated the aspiring regional hegemon in an international court of law. Beijing can’t back down.

In the aftermath of an unambiguous and unanimous legal verdict that strikes down Beijing’s historic claims to the South China Sea, rebukes it for turning coral reefs into island fortresses through massive dredging and sides with bullied Philippine fishermen, the Chinese government’s legitimacy is on the line.

China’s response will be guided by the reactions of a nationalistic public and a conviction that the judges in The Hague who delivered their stinging judgment were pawns in a U.S. conspiracy to contain China’s rise. China will now turn its wrath on America. Before the verdict, the China Daily denounced the case as a “farce directed by Washington.” On Tuesday, Xinhua News Agency used similar language, calling it a “farce directed with meticulous care by outside forces.”

At a time of rapidly rising tensions, the immediate danger is that miscalculations or accidents could draw China and America into conflict.

Ahead of the decision as China’s denunciations of The Hague tribunal reached a crescendo, China held live-fire drills off the Paracels, a group of South China Sea islands it controls. China is “not afraid of trouble,” President Xi Jinping asserted. Earlier, America sent an aircraft-carrier battle group into the region.


On a map, the “nine-dash line” that the tribunal has invalidated looks like a cow’s tongue hanging from China’s southern coast and encompassing almost the entire South China Sea. In the eyes of the Chinese public, it is a proud marker of their country’s spreading power and prestige. It is stamped into every new Chinese passport. Likewise, the artificial islands have become prominent emblems of China’s resurgence.

For a country that regularly invokes the sanctity of international law, citing its own victimization in the era of arrogant imperialism, the outcome is a moral challenge, as well as a legal one. Two years ago, Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged a United Nations gathering to “reject the law of the jungle where the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must.”...

More.

And fuck China, the biggest fucking crybabies.

Josh Rubenstein Flies with the Blue Angels (VIDEO)

Very cool.

Rubenstein's the chief meteorologist at CBS News 2 Los Angeles.

It's a ride of a lifetime.

For Enemies of the United States, the U.S. Navy is a Frightening Adversary

The "silent service," via Theo Spark:

Thousands Enjoy Last Day at MCAS Miramar Air Show, Despite Morning Rain (VIDEO)

Well, good thing we're getting some rain. I think folks down in San Diego can live with a shortened air show schedule. We need the water!

Watch, at ABC News 10 San Diego, "Thousands enjoy last day of Air Show despite morning rain."

VIDEO: Two F-35C Lightning II Landings Aboard the U.S. Navy's USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69)

Via Lockheed Martin on Twitter.

MCAS Miramar Pre-Show with Blue Angels (VIDEO)

The air show's this weekend.

This was a special treat.

Watch, at ABC News 10 San Diego, "The Blue Angels blast into MCAS Miramar."

USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Tested at Top Speed (VIDEO)

At CNN:

U.S. Builds Up Arctic Spy Network as Russia and China Increase Presence

That's what I'm talking about!

At LAT.

Why the U.S. is amassing an Arctic spy network http://t.co/PI89v54Y71 pic.twitter.com/c9aR9UxVLa

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) September 7, 2015

China Navy Operating Off Coast of Alaska

This was a kind of show-of-force for President Obama, who was in Anchorage for his climate change summit earlier in the week.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Five Chinese Navy Ships Are Operating in Bering Sea off Alaska."

Also, "Chinese Navy Ships Came Within 12 Nautical Miles of US Coast":

Chinese navy ships off Alaska in recent days weren’t just operating in the area for the first time: They also came within 12 nautical miles of the coast, making a rare foray into U.S. territorial waters, according to the Pentagon.

Pentagon officials said late Thursday that the five Chinese navy ships had passed through U.S. territorial waters as they transited the Aleutian Islands, but said they had complied with international law and didn’t do anything threatening.

“This was a legal transit of U.S. territorial seas conducted in accordance with the Law of the Sea Convention,” said Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Bill Urban.

U.S. officials said there was no known official communication to the U.S. from the ships.

The passage was seen as significant as Beijing has long objected to U.S. Navy vessels transiting its territorial waters or operating in international waters just outside.

China’s Defense Ministry confirmed that its navy ships had sailed to the Bering Sea for training after joint exercises with Russia in late August, but said the activity was routine and not aimed at any particular country.

U.S. officials said earlier that they were tracking the five ships in the area, where they hadn’t seen the Chinese navy operating before, but they didn’t say how close the ships had come to U.S. territory.

The foray, just as President Barack Obama was visiting Alaska, threw a fresh spotlight on China’s expanding naval power and ambitions on the eve of a lavish military parade in Beijing. It also came just three weeks before China’s President, Xi Jinping, begins a state visit to the U.S. already clouded by tensions over alleged cyberattacks on the U.S. and China’s island-building in the South China Sea.

The flotilla apparently traveled east from somewhere near Russia and entered the Bering Sea, navigating north of the Aleutian Islands before transiting south, where they undertook the “innocent passage” through U.S. waters between two islands, a defense official said.

That principle allows military ships to transit foreign territorial waters if they don’t conduct threatening activity. The Chinese didn’t give prior notification to the U.S. before doing so, but under international law, they don’t need to.

The Chinese don’t always acknowledge those laws, however, according to U.S. defense reports. For example, Beijing claims that U.S. warships should request permission before making their own “innocent passage” in Chinese territorial waters.

During fiscal years 2012 and 2013, the Pentagon challenged this notion, deploying U.S. naval ships through Chinese territorial waters without notifying Beijing first. According to those reports, the U.S. did not make the same challenge during fiscal 2014. There is no data available for the current fiscal year.

U.S. officials believe China is building a “blue-water” navy capable of operating far from its shores, while also developing missiles and other capabilities designed to prevent the U.S. Navy from intervening in a conflict in Asia.

Many of those capabilities, including a new antiship ballistic missile, were put on display for the first time on Thursday during the parade to mark the surrender of Japanese forces at the end of World War II.

Some U.S. military experts saw the Chinese transit through the Aleutians as a positive step, in that they had adhered to the “innocent passage” principle...

Well, China aspires to be the world's dominant power, the hegemon, and to do so it needs to challenge the U.S. All of this maneuvering off U.S. territory is par for the course. We should be really worried, however, when China begins to deploy more and greater military hardware than our side. We're not at that threshold, yet. See, for example, the U.S. Naval Institute, "Report: Chinese Develop Special "Kill Weapon" to Destroy U.S. Aircraft Carriers." And from just this week, at Free Beacon, "China Shows New intermediate-Range Missile Capable of Targeting Ships."

USS Carl Vinson Back in San Diego

At the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Vinson strike group comes home: Carrier did 6 months of airstrikes against ISIS during marathon deployment":

The five ships of the Carl Vinson carrier strike group returned home Thursday after a marathon deployment, including six months of dropping bombs on Islamic jihadists in Iraq and Syria.

At piers around San Diego Bay, there were kisses, tears and long sighs of relief.

“I’m immensely proud of the 6,000 men and women of the Carl Vinson carrier strike group,” said Rear Adm. Christopher Grady, the group’s commander. “I hope you are, too.”

He was speaking from a pier at North Island Naval Air Station, where the Vinson had just docked to the cheers of waiting family members.

Signs in the crowd spoke of feelings pent up during the nearly 10-month odyssey — the longest scheduled deployment since the Vietnam era.

One said, “#300 Days Without You.” Another read, “We Made It.”

“It was really hard,” said Keila Bennekin, 29, who was five months pregnant when her sailor husband, Anthony, departed with the Vinson on Aug. 22.

More.

Iran Seizes Marshall Islands-Flagged Cargo Ship

At the New York Times, "U.S. Sends Destroyer After Iran Detains Ship":

WASHINGTON — The United States Navy sent a destroyer toward the Persian Gulf on Tuesday after Iran took control of a Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship it accused of trespassing in territorial waters, American military officials said.

The ship, the Maersk Tigris, with 24 crew members, was intercepted by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps patrol boats on Tuesday morning while traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, a Pentagon official said. The Iranian forces fired shots across the ship’s bow, the official said, after its captain declined an order by the forces to divert farther into Iranian waters.

The official said the ship was traveling through “an internationally recognized maritime route.” After being fired on, it issued a distress call, prompting the United States Navy to direct a destroyer, the Farragut, to the area and to put aircraft on standby to monitor the situation.

The episode threatened fragile negotiations over reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but American officials were quick to play down its significance, correcting initial reports out of Iran that it had seized a United States ship. The Marshall Islands, in the Pacific, have been independent of the United States since 1986 but have a “free association” relationship with the country.

Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said the ship was traveling through Iranian territorial waters that are, by international agreement, open to foreign ships making an innocent passage. He said it was “inappropriate” for Iran to have fired warning shots, but he added that it was too early to know whether Iran’s intervention was a violation of international navigation freedom. Iran has in the past threatened to block the strait, a route for much of the world’s oil.

An American military official said Tuesday that the Farragut was about 60 miles away from the site of the episode, and that as of the afternoon there had been no communication between the United States Navy and Iran.

A Maersk spokesman said that the ship was a charter vessel, not a Maersk-crewed ship. A spokesman for the charter company, Rickmers Shipmanagement, said that the crew members were all Eastern European or Asian, and that the ship had been headed to a port near Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, from Jidda, Saudi Arabia. It was carrying general cargo, “anything from food to machinery to electronics,” he said.

The Rickmers spokesman, Cor Radings, said the captain had said that the ship did not stray into Iranian waters outside the international maritime route. “She was stopped by the Iranians and instructed to go to a rendezvous point in Iranian waters,” he said. “Since then we’ve lost contact with the ship.”

More.