Post-America's shame - and really scary vulnerability

The incident involving the riverine boats in the Persian Gulf is starting to look off-the-charts bad:

The Swedish-designed Combat Boat 90 can make the sharpest of turns at high speed, stop nearly on a dime, maneuver like magic and, with its Rolls-Royce jet-propulsion system, can speed along at over 45 miles an hour in rivers and shallow coastlines while transporting 18 amphibious troops.

But what good is any of that if it falls into enemy hands?

There is something fishy about how such a high-tech U.S. craft can "stray accidentally into Iranian waters due to a navigation error," as Defense Secretary Ash Carter described it on Thursday to Univision. The Pentagon had previously claimed engine trouble for an incident that's humiliated the U.S., as Iranian video showed to the world 10 American sailors on their knees at gunpoint.

A retired operations commander for the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, Christopher Harmer, told CNN the capture constituted "a severe failure," charging that "either the naval leadership put these sailors in an impossible situation, or the sailors are professionally incompetent." Harmer has researched the increased lethality of Iran's submarine fleet for the Institute for the Study of War.

That one of the sailors would appear in an Iranian video apologizing may have actually violated the military's Code of Conduct, which requires that a detainee give name, rank, serial number and age, but "evade answering further questions" and "make no oral or written statements disloyal" to his country "and its allies or harmful to their cause."

Harmer told the Washington Times, "the U.S. Navy looks extraordinarily incompetent. ... In its ability to transit boats without violating Iranian waters, they look incompetent to know how to deal with a mechanical malfunction, and now that they've been taken into custody, they're apologizing."

Harmer told CNN there was "no reason for a small vessel to be out that far and especially without escorting ships around it," and "the Navy has to explain why you have small ships transiting 300 miles of open ocean."

Iran claims its Revolutionary Guard Corps seized the CB90's GPS gear and that it revealed U.S. espionage. As reported in Defense News, House Armed Services Committee member Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a Marine who served in the Iraq War, claimed there was no way the Iran military "didn't reverse engineer, or look at and copy everything that they possibly could" of the two commandeered boats' high-tech equipment.

The whole damn world - our "allies," or perhaps more accurately, those nations that were our allies until they saw how "fundamental transformation" plays itself out on the world stage, our adversaries and our enemies - is taking stock of the deepest implications of this.

There will be more such provocation, rest assured.