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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1385 thread views

Transnational Thursday for July 9, 2026

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US Cmdr. Gabriel Edwards , the commander of the helicopter squadron of the USS George W. Bush, died earlier this week in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy announced Wednesday. According to official reports, Edward’s needed up missing at see when his helicopter collided with a unicorn. The collision caused Edwards to teleport fifty miles to the left, where he was lost at sea in contested Iranian waters. His death was not the result of any hostile military action. Any concurrent ceasefire violations that happened the same night as his disappearance are completely coincidental

He is survived by two children. I appreciated the United States Navy’s great candor and honesty during this difficult time for them.

In the interests of speaking plainly, I believe the Navy is lying about the circumstances about this man’s death, potentially in a way that violates federal law and the Constitution. Frankly I think the only reason they didn’t ship him back to Norfolk and claim he died of a heart attack is because they don’t have his body.

potentially in a way that violates federal law and the Constitution

I can't claim I know "federal law", it's vast and incomprehensible. But the Constitution is reasonably small, even with the amendments, and pretty straightforward. How exactly did the military violate it when describing this incident, in your opinion? If you want to expand on the federal law part, feel free to also.

I’ll take that bet.

I say this as someone with a very low opinion of the current chain of command; a ceasefire is politically valuable at the moment, and our President (and SecDef) are exactly the kind of people who might apply pressure to keep it quiet.

The odds just favor a legitimate crash.

It's always plausible for the military to be lying, but helicopters are genuinely dangerous even in noncombat scenarios, and four days of search would be a pretty expensive cover story. There were also three survivors, which... isn't incompatible with hostile military action and isn't anywhere near the size of the general coordination you'd need to keep the story secret, but sounds closer to 'mechanical problem' than 'rocket fire' from a gutcheck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Israeli_helicopter_disaster - 73 people died. No enemy action whatsoever.

There were also three survivors, which... isn't incompatible with hostile military action and isn't anywhere near the size of the general coordination you'd need to keep the story secret, but sounds closer to 'mechanical problem' than 'rocket fire' from a gutcheck.

Particularly since the standard emergency bailout procedure for two-pilot/multi-crew helicopters over water is for one pilot to attempt to maintain control so that the rest of the crew can jump as a group, and then get the helicopter away from them before a bunch of highly kinetic metal blades hit the water. The later is the far more dangerous part of even a 'controlled' crash, and it's basically a deliberate trade of the last pilot to save the rest, who can help eachother swim / stay aloft and activate any rescue equipment. In a kinetic shootdown over water, it typically tends to be everyone, since a shot that takes down the aircraft is probably violent disassembly in air, or just one or two survivors.

Also, this part of BigGuy's conspiracy-

The collision caused Edwards to teleport fifty miles to the left, where he was lost at sea in contested Iranian waters.

-is just stereotypically American geographical confusion trying to wrap up in sarcasm.

The Arabian Sea- the place where the aircraft was claimed lost- is not the Arabian Gulf, the culture-rivalry rename of the same waters as the Persian Gulf ala the Korea-Japan East Sea versus Sea of Japan. The Arabian Sea is a completely different body of water in the opposite direction from contested Iranian waters.

Iran's territorial water claims that are causing tensions are regarding the Strait of Hormuz. The Persian Gulf is the waters west of the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf of Oman is the waters east of the strait of hormuz leading to the Arabian Sea. But the arabian sea itself is the part of the indian ocean between the arabian peninsula and India. There is no Iranian claim on the broader geography of the Arabian Sea, not least because Pakistan dominates the north face and Oman dominates the west. Iran only has the tiniest of proximity in the furthest north west, which is not part of the Strait of Hormuz dispute.

Notably, the general location of the carrier groups since the start of the war has been generally understood to be... not there. During the war and the blockade one of the main frustrations for Iran's efforts to attack the carriers was that it could find them, and that was because duringn both points the carriers fell back into the Arabian Sea far enough to stay out of Iranian detection and weapon range. (There was the war-time conspiracy that the laundry fire on the Gerald Ford was actually a lie to disguise a critical damage from anti-ship cruise missile, but that largely petered out when the Ford returned to a high traffic port without observable evidence of a cruise missile.) During the blockade portion of the post-conflict, helicopter landings of ships trying to run past the blockade happened in the Arabian sea, well away from Iranian waters and ability to interfere.

So the military version of the story is that a helicopter from a carrier known to have been operating in the Arabian sea away from Iranian waters and weapon ranges went down for non-iranian-weapon reasons, with casualties consistent with a controlled mechanical failure helicopter crash.

The BigGuy version presupposes that the carrier group was far further north than there is any conflict-contemporary record of them being, in order for '50 miles left' to be anywhere near Iranian waters as opposed to, say, uncontested Oman. It also is probably confusing a body of water already to the west of the Strait of Hormuz that no carrier has been observed in since the war started- even in which case 50 miles left would be further from the strait- to a body of water thousands of square miles large to the south east, in which fifty miles 'left' would still be... well south.

Something something war is how some Americans learn geography.

I need someone to list all the Looney Toons accidents that happened in Iraq I & II, Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc. Because I'm starting to turn Schizo from the fact that the USA is claiming all these losses of men and material from ridiculous mishaps ("A clothes dryer caught fire and destroyed a carrier" "we landed the planes in a mud puddle on a rescue mission that just happened to be right next to the nuclear supplies we were planning to Mission Impossible" "Plane crashed in the middle of nowhere"). I'm even looking at the two recent civilian skydiving accidents a little crossways, and they happened in Missouri and France.

246 fires on aircraft carriers and big-deck amphibs over 70 years, after WWII.

"A clothes dryer caught fire and destroyed a carrier"

"Destroyed" is... a tremendously strong word. It's not like FORD went full BONHOMME RICHARD.

There's also that time the US sank one of its own subs while the thing was moored at a pier. Oh, and that time an aircraft carrier sliced the top off the cruiser USS BELKNAP. Can't recall if the cruiser was carrying nuclear cruise missiles at the time or not, but I do remember that the officer determined to be at fault had just won an award for his ship-handling skills.

And from a related branch, there was that landing craft that up and sank during training off the coast of California, killing 9 marines. Or the F-35 and refueling tanker casualty that had a botched SAR operation in very friendly waters. And I don't need to tell you of the (oft-maligned, and possibly out of context) Osprey safety record concerns...

"Destroyed" is... a tremendously strong word. It's not like FORD went full BONHOMME RICHARD.

Reports have varied, but we're looking at a return to service in 2027 on the optimistic government timeline. While "destroyed" is perhaps aggressive, "damaged sufficiently to be removed from operation" is infelicitous, and anyway we're being weirdo skeptics so we're rounding up and assuming the damage is worse than we were told.

If we were at real war, it'd be operating. But since they can very well do without it, nobody wants to take a risk, so everybody is covering their asses and crossing the t's and dotting the i's. That's very different from being "destroyed" or even substantially "damaged".

How much of that is due to the fire, and how much is standard/deferred maintenance cycles, though? I have a feeling they'd be in port close until 2027 even without the fire.

The US Navy in WWII lost quite a few ships and aircraft to typhoon storms in the Pacific. Typhoon Cobra sunk three destroyers and killed 790 sailors, but there were a few other storms too.

There’s the German U-boat that had a catastrophic toilet failure…

Okay, but early submarines really cannot be used as representative of modern(ish) naval accident rates. Those things were... well, death traps is a bit too strong of a word, but issues abounded.

Interesting that the landing craft crash happened just five days after Russian forces broke through at Mariupol....

I'm honestly unsure of what you're trying to imply here.

That the importance of a person’s martyrdom is often only visible in the light of history, and isn’t controlled by the number of tasteless bon mottes belched out by soulless haters. On April 5, 1968, it looked pretty definite that the Civil Rights movement had been killed with Dr. King. In hindsight, that is obviously not the case. We won’t know the verdict on Charlie Kirk until at least 2050.

I think you responded to the wrong comment? Charlie Kirk sure wasn't on that landing craft (although it would be an even funnier conspiracy theory...)

God damn it sorry, I had a post replying to the post in the main culture war thread discussing his Kirk’s death. I got your reply notification and thought you were asking for clarification on that.

To answer your question, There were persistent rumors that a large contingent of NATO advisors got trapped in Mariupol because the city was encircled faster than anticipated. So it’s interesting that you have a mass casualty producing event just at the right time you would need an excuse for casualties from that.

There are also rumors that Biden’s trade of Britney Griner for Viktor Bout was to secretly get back high-ranking American POWs from that battle, hence why it looked like such a hilariously unfair swap on paper.

That there is big unofficial US personnel presence on the ground in Ukraine as advisors and if you squint there is pattern where USA training accidents in conus happens soon after massive Russian missile attacks in Ukraine.

Judging by how well Ukraine's best pilot their F16s, the idea that there are people that help with stuff like Patriot at critical points is not unthinkable.

That'd have to be a lot of people in on the coverup... the other 12 landing craft and support ships/personnel involved in the exercise, the half the crew that did survive...

Technically possible, as you said, if you squint.

The US navy has something of a record of stupid crashes. The inquiry into the Fitzgerald crash in 2017 came to the conclusion that one of the contributing causes was crew fatigue due to a sustained high operational tempo. The idea that basic safety compliance collapses during combat ops making a technically non-combat crash an order of magnitude more likely seems obviously correct.

That said, if the Iranians had shot the chopper down, the Trump administration would probably lie about it. To those familiar with combat helo flying, how likely is a near miss which does enough damage to render the chopper inoperable (e.g. by taking out the tail rotor) leading to a ditching without blowing it to smithereens in mid-air?

The 1967 USS Forrestal fire is a good place to start if you want to get the idea of the sort of things that can just sort of happen by accident (21 aircraft destroyed, 40 damaged, 134 deaths).

John McCain – better known as a US Senator – was present at the fire. What's not as well known about him is that his aircraft crashed twice (due to engine trouble on both occasions, I believe) and he clipped power lines a third time, on top of being shot down.

Generally speaking my understanding is that military aviation and indeed "the military" more broadly has gotten safer as time has gone on. This might have the effect of elevating accidents when they do occur.

Don’t forget Argentina!

In all seriousness, listing incidents is just begging for a Texas sharpshooter to come and draw you a bullseye. All the usual SSC pieces about selection bias apply. Batshit insane stuff does happen occasionally. If you turn up the number of opportunities by, say, maintaining the world’s largest navy and two largest air forces, then sending them across the planet to run combat missions, you will generate more batshit insane incidents. Drawing a line through all these incidents will tell you more about the person drawing the line than about the base rate!

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