The event that occurred this week (Oct. 12) in the year 2000 was another strong indication that the rules of war had changed in the new century, and that America’s unquestioned superiority in military technology was to be challenged henceforth by an enemy so marinated in religious extremism that it was completely unfazed by the prospect of death, and therefore equally unfazed by America’s superior war weaponry.
As a result, on that October day in the first year of the 21st century, two members of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization, powering a 50-foot fiberglass fishing boat, approached the 500-foot USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer docked in the seaport town of Aden, in Yemen. As their fishing boat neared the Cole, the two men idled the engine, stood up, smiled, waved at the sailors watching them impassively from onboard the Cole, and then detonated approximately 300 kilograms of high-powered explosives, instantly making themselves martyrs, but also instantly killing 17 of the Cole’s sailors, wounding 39 and creating a gaping 40-foot hole in the ship’s side. The explosion’s resulting fireball was seen for miles — the shockwaves actually knocking over cars parked onshore — and people as far as three miles away thought they were experiencing an earthquake.
A new age had dawned, and with it came the sobering realization that America’s military strategy, of which ships like the Cole were an integral part, might need re-thinking. That strategy was mainly designed for similarly conventional enemies such as Russia, which also boasted a powerful army and navy, and China, an emerging superpower that was getting more of America’s attention.
In a conventional, 20th Century-type war, the Cole would have been a formidable match against any Russian or Chinese vessel. At a cost of approximately 1 billion dollars the Cole was a state-of-the-art warship that possessed the very latest in stealth technology, making it extremely difficult to track on radar, while its own tracking system, AEGIS, could simultaneously track incoming missiles and aircraft more than 200 miles away.
Defensively, the Cole was protected by 70 tons of armored shielding, plus enhanced protection against chemical, biological and nuclear attacks. Offensively the Cole bristled with Tomahawk cruise missiles, anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles, and a Phalanx Close-In Weapons System that fired 50 20-mm shells per second.
And yet this mighty, billion-dollar warship was defenseless against a small fishing boat manned by two members of a jihadist group that had as many ties to the 5th Century as to the 21st Century. What’s more, as Americans would learn less than a year later, on September 11, 2001, the attack on the Cole was only the beginning of this new kind of war against both America and the West.
