Oman's navy pulled 23 sailors off the burning tanker El Gaia in the Strait of Hormuz and is still searching for two more, Oman's Maritime Security Centre said Tuesday. The Panama-flagged ship, owned by a company in the United Arab Emirates, caught fire in its engine room 1.3 nautical miles north of the Musandam peninsula. Oman named no attacker. Britain's maritime trade office said an "unknown projectile" hit the ship in the early hours of Sunday. US Central Command said an Iranian missile crippled the ship last month and an Iranian drone hit it again over the weekend. Iran's Revolutionary Guards said the tanker strayed into a restricted lane and struck naval mines. Thirteen of the 14 Indian crew are safe, India's foreign ministry said.
Nobody in Washington is answering that fire. The Pentagon's inspector general explained why on Monday.
Operation Epic Fury cost $33.4 billion between February 28 and June 30, the inspector general wrote in a report dated September 9 and released Monday. Of that, $22.3 billion went on munitions fired. The inspector general wrote that the spending "has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply." He named the chokepoints: rocket motors, explosives and skilled labor. He counted the hardware: four F-15s destroyed, one F-35 damaged, seven KC-135 tankers damaged, and up to 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones lost.
Trump had already explained, three days earlier, why he would not fight anyway — and the Saudi pipeline numbers show what his phone call bought.
