Compare: USS Arleigh Burke Class Destroyer vs Iranian Navy Flagship Alvand

Image credit: Flippin

So why am I showing this? Galrahn thinks the US missed an opportunity by not taking a picture of our ships next to the Iranians when they passed:

It is more than a little disturbing to me that a ~1,500 ton Iranian corvette built in 1971 with 4 ASMs and no air defenses escorted by an old oil tanker can send the price of US oil up 1.8% for simply sailing on the ocean. Iran just significantly shifted an economic market in the US with a piece of shit corvette even though the USS Enterprise (CVN 65) was literally right there. Think about that a second...[...]

So, clearly the Navy has a communication problem... How can the US Navy address this? Well, if I was given 5-star rank for a day I would sail my Arleigh Burke class destroyer along side the Iranian Navy flagship for a "wave and hello" and take a photograph of the two ships side by side while underway. I realize that strategic communication is a forgotten, and perhaps lost art in the US Navy, but if you put a photograph on Navy.mil with the two warships in near proximity that illustrates the sheer size difference between the flagship of the Iranian Navy and a US Navy Arleigh Burke class destroyer, I will predict that the unofficial PASSEX is worth several thousand words to a great many reporters and Americans while also being a photograph worth about $14 million in savings to the US energy economy a day.

With a single photograph the concerns of an Iranian corvette threat to the Mediterranean Sea can be turned into an opportunity to communicate a visual public reminder of what US naval power looks like, and likely turns the Iranian naval threat to the Mediterranean Sea into the punchline of a joke - exactly what it should be.

Read it all as I can't do the article justice.

h/t Evil Canuck

Cross posted at Jawa Report