this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Yeah this one really doesn't stretch the imagination and is definitely plausible / likely.
Still gonna try to remember that I might have this cognitive blind spot though. I like to think I'm pretty canny so it's embarrassing to realise that I might buy a blatant cover story so long as its self deprecating slapstick comedy.
I want to assume the worst and it serves my interests to do so. But when Iran claims 500+ US casualties in the first days of the war, either I see the body bags in an image I could put on a protest sign or I repeat something that might discredit and humiliate me later. A couple weeks later and that's a claim I can't capitalise on in anti-war activism. War is one of those things where a kind of centrist scepticism is actually valid because both sides have every reason to maximise their gains and minimise their losses. It's just as plausible that the US doesn't want Iran to know its drone hit an impenetrable carrier strike group, but the fog of war means I can't say that and maintain the same kind of reliability that I have when I give an opinion about something scientific. It's too much cost for too little gain that might make me look silly.
Casualties includes wounded
That's a very fair point, but the ratio of wounded to dead casualties ranges from 3:1 historically to 10:1 in the most optimistic modern scenarios. The US claims 7(?) dead and Iran's numbers at that point would maybe be 50~ dead. Hiding 50 dead is harder than hiding 7 dead. My hospital's morgue could fit five corpses before you had to jump over them to get to the one you needed, and it was large compared to most military ones. For Iran's claim to be true I would need to see some kind of non-Iranian confirmation with the photos of moving that many wounded or dead people. It's a logistical challenge that should be evident from the number of medevac flights going back to the US, and at least so far I haven't seen that personally.
If I saw a photo of the laundry room on the USS Gerald R. Ford I'd believe that as conclusively as if I saw scorch marks on the side of it, but I have to be agnostic in the absence of either and lean toward Occam's razor. It's easier to fuck up a laundry vent than it is to penetrate multiple layers of screening ships that exist to stop things from hitting a carrier. The one thing the US Navy orients its entire fleet defense around is protecting carriers, so it's the target in the entire region which is most hardened against attack. It isn't invulnerable and I expect one to be hit by a hypersonic missile at some point, but I need hard proof before I believe the thing that would benefit me the most to believe.
That's fair enough. I'm not very knowledgable, but I thought 50 wasn't too implausible. You're right that that would be hard to cover up, and would be independently verifiable tho.
I agree with you on the laundry fire, but I'd like to think it was intentional sabotage.
Intentional sabotage is my optimistic scenario of the most realistic scenario. Any dumbass on the USS Dumbass could have not cleaned out the small lint filter and caused a fire, much less the bigger vents behind the laundromat. 50~ deaths is still something I think the US could conceivably cover-up, but it should be accompanied by a lot of aircraft going to San Antonio/San Diego/Bethesda. Those military hospitals are what foreign ones immediately transport patients to in peacetime, lacking the beds and specialists to do something like neurosurgery or burn recovery across all of the Japanese bases.
but someone's flushing socks, right? or is that also unconfirmed?
The toilets are the same case. Maybe it's sabotage, maybe it's a lack of maintenance, maybe it's teenagers doing stupid shit that results in the same problem homeowners regularly have. I can't say for certain and the only video I thought was legitimate turned out to be from an earlier instance of ship toilets flooding which made me more self-critical toward war claims.
i see. i feel like i also knew it was speculation at some point and then i forgot. embarrassing for me.
Fuck if I know though. Like the Bonhomme Richard, even the investigation won't be reliable. I assume that any trustworthy military account is going to emerge like a decade after it happened.
Yeah I suppose the important part of the story was that the carrier was out of the fight for the time being, at the most inopportune moment possible. Everything else might as well be noise as far as understanding what's going on in a useful sense.