And how do you suppose he was to distinguish an oil tanker from a warship beyond his visual range? If you know anything about historical wartime ASCM engagements, from the Falklands to Lebanon, the missiles often end up either being shot at the wrong target or hitting the wrong one because it is often very difficult to distinguish them, basically one blip from another on radar, for both the pilot and the missile. Any beyond visual range targeting is a challenge, as we have demonstrated several times shooting down either our own aircraft or civilian ones.
So yeah, dial back on the hubris a bit as we have had our fair share of fuck-ups too.
Certainly, but that assumes that's how things went (among other things, the Iraqi pilot ignored radio warnings from the Stark) and otherwise does not invalidate that the Iraqi air force (and military at large) was dreadfully incompetent, which is the point I was making with the quoted bold text. You may be giving the Iraqis a bit too much credit. And no hubris here, unless hubris is not rationalizing the actions of someone who killed and wounded over 50 American Sailors which then, to add insult to injury, the Iraqis stated was somehow our fault. If you read up on the war at large, you'd find it to be excessively frustrating because that's not even the worst of it. They'd so regularly drop gas on their own guys, they tried to use it as 'proof' that the Iranians were hitting them with chemical agents.
But, we can only judge the Iraqis and Iraqi aviation by our standards if there was any degree of parity between how the US and Iraqi militaries operated, any parity between US and Iraqi aviation training, organization, and capabilities, if this was an isolated one-off accident/incident and not the regularly scheduled Iraqi screw-ups (just this time hitting someone else other than their own guys), and if the scenario and events that took place were so tricky. The pilot, among other things, ignored radio warnings from the USS Stark, and the Iraqi government went so far as to claim that the ship was in violation of the exclusion zone (which was false, so no excuse there) and had been a valid, non-neutral target and additionally somehow tried to shift the blame on Iran as well. Yes, they actually said it was our fault for the ship being struck. How the Iraqis operated would be to take blind shots at any shipping remotely due east/southeast of Basra they weren't aware of belonging to them, making no effort towards identification. Their assumption was everything was a valid target. How about that? There's other details that this was a little more than a spontaneous oopsie, but the point is it wasn't so clear cut a situation as the challenges of BVR or the limitations of ASCMs. Why did they jump through hoops blaming the US and Iran for their supposedly innocent accident, anyways?
I will close by stating the sheer incompetence of the Iraqi military in that and other conflicts they've been in is very well-documented. You may say we have our screw-ups here and there, but they were very regularly hitting their own guys with artillery, airstrikes, chemical weapons, machine gun fire, etc. in the 80s alone. What is the odd screw-up for us was and is the norm for them. Let's not give them too much credit.
