The United States Navy’s torpedoing of the unarmed Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on March 4, 2026 is a war crime. For all the “warrior” braggadocio of the arguably deranged “secretary of war,” it will be remembered in naval history as an act that was as cowardly as it was vicious. This crime will take its place alongside the 1988 shooting down of an Iranian commercial airliner by the USS Vincennes, which killed 290 innocent people. In fact, in both method and execution, the destruction of the Iranian vessel continues on a larger scale the recent targeted killings of defenseless fishermen in waters off the coast of Latin America.

In this case, a submarine of the most powerful military force in the world snuck up on an isolated vessel posing no threat to anyone, gave no warning, offered no opportunity for surrender, and sent more than 140 sailors to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Pete Hegseth, a Christian fascist who believes that he is an instrument of Armageddon, then walked to a podium at the Pentagon and boasted about it.

The Trump administration has not offered a single word of justification. It has not attempted to identify the legal basis of this killing. It has not claimed self-defense. It has not alleged that the IRIS Dena was engaged in hostile action. It has not argued proportionality, military necessity or imminent threat. It has offered nothing—because it does not believe that anything is required. So much for the “rules-based order” about which the US has been lecturing everyone for the last three decades. What has replaced it is the naked assertion that the United States may kill whomever it wishes, wherever it wishes, whenever it wishes and that the act of killing is itself sufficient justification. “Quiet death,” Hegseth called it.

Mass murder in the Indian Ocean: The torpedoing of the IRIS Dena