Garrison Davis

There were also no damage control efforts to save the ship.

In February of this year, just days before his own death, Iran's former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatened the U.S.

carriers operating in the Persian Gulf in a post on Twitter, because it's fucking 2026.

Quote, "'The Americans constantly say "'that they've sent a warship towards Iran.

"'Of course, a warship is a dangerous piece "'of military hardware.

"'However, more dangerous than that warship "'is the weapon that can send that warship "'to the bottom of the sea.'"

Now, it's kind of unclear exactly what he was talking about.

Maybe it's some sort of secret weapon that the Iranians have that we don't know about.

But we do know that Iranian negotiators are currently talking with the People's Republic of China about purchasing CM-302 supersonic missiles.

These were developed by Chinese military planners to fly low and fast, avoiding most of the layered defenses a boat like the Ford enjoys.

They're carrier killer missiles, or at least that's the idea.

Beijing also has a line of land-based carrier killer missiles because...

If you think you might wind up in a war with the United States, it probably behooves you to think about how you would kill an aircraft carrier.

Now, again, Iran doesn't have any of these weapons systems yet, at least not to our knowledge.

But this war of choice by the United States didn't come as a complete surprise.

The Iranian military and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had been preparing to fight this war for quite some time.

Those preparations have included the construction of multiple fake aircraft carriers, which their forces have sunk in a variety of war games exercises.

The most recent of these occurred in 2020.

The Prophet Muhammad 14 exercise was meant to prepare for an attack on a Nimitz-class carrier.

And ironically, Iran made it too easy to sink, which caused it to go down while it was being towed in an inconvenient location that temporarily blocked a canal.