The latest ‘threatening gesture’ by Iran turns out to be far less hostile than initially described. The threatening broadcasts were likely the work of a prankster that Naval officials regularly hear.

All that was different was the five speedboats running around, even though it’s common to have boats nearby, monitoring who’s nearby and what they’re up. Such monitoring is perfectly acceptable and a well understood practice near any nation’s territorial waters.

So why did a handful of boats cause consternation? The story being floated now is that it seemed eerily like a 5 yr old war game simulation by the Dr. Strangeloves of the Pentagon in which the US warships lost. Except that it really didn’t.

In the days since the encounter with five Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, American officers have acknowledged that they have been studying anew the lessons from a startling simulation conducted in August 2002. In that war game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats.

“The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack,” said Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in the war game as commander of a Red Team force representing an unnamed Persian Gulf military. “The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes.”

And:

“It’s clear, strategically, where the Iranian military has gone,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Friday. “For the years that this strategic shift toward their small, fast boats has taken place, we’ve been very focused on that.”

In the simulation, General Van Riper sent wave after wave of relatively inexpensive speedboats to charge at the costlier, more advanced fleet approaching the Persian Gulf. His force of small boats attacked with machine guns and rockets, reinforced with missiles launched from land and air. Some of the small boats were loaded with explosives to detonate alongside American warships in suicide attacks. That core tactic of swarming played out in real life last weekend, though on a much more limited scale and without any shots fired.

Wait. How limited?

General Van Riper’s attack was much more complex and sophisticated than anything that could have involved the Iranian boats last weekend. The broad outline of the 2002 war game was reported at the time, but in interviews since last weekend’s episode, General Van Riper and other officers have provided new details about the simulation.

In the war game, scores of adversary speedboats and larger naval vessels had been shadowing and hectoring the Blue Team fleet for days. The Blue Team defenses also faced cruise missiles fired simultaneously from land and from warplanes, as well as the swarm of speedboats firing heavy machine guns and rockets — and pulling alongside to detonate explosives on board.

When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy’s firing of guns and missiles, it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.

In a telephone interview, General Van Riper recalled that his idea of a swarming attack grew from Marine Corps studies of the natural world, where insects and animals — from tiny ant colonies to wolf packs — move in groups to overwhelm larger prey.

“It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time,” he said.

Though one suicide boat could cause serious damage, the last time Iran was known to utilize suicide as a weapon was in the middle of its very active war with Iraq, a completely different scenario akin to US troops storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. The attack that crippled a warship was done by people from an entirely different country and sect under Al Qaida’s direction. It’s akin to claiming Mexican boats were threatening if terrorists from the US had attacked some ship several years earlier. They’re both in the same region and both have a lot of Christians, don’t they?

Okay, it’s not a perfect analogy, of course. But only one boat came within 200 yards - that’s two football fields - which is hardly close enough for a suicide bomb. If they had shoulder mounted weapons, that would be close enough to use them but such an effort would be spotted. And with just 5 boats, all could have been sunk fairly quickly. Warning shots weren’t even fired, which alone might have made the boats retreat to a greater distance.

What happene was a minor concern was blown up to sound like something far more threatening than what actually occurred. And from the perspective of Iranians, a group of US warships had far more potential to threaten their country than a handful of speedboats.

To be sure, Iran may have been testing how the US would respond, but that could as easily be for defensive instead of offensive reasons.

Yet on that incident, Bush rattled his war sabre as did at least one GOP candidate. Because of a 5 year old theoretical exercise that was very, very remotely similar.

It’s outrageous to suggest a devastating war could hinge on something as simple as that until you recall Iraq was attacked for doing even less.