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The US Torpedoed an Unarmed Ship. Who Are the Good Guys Again?
In the early hours of March 4, 2026, in international waters off the coast of Galle, Sri Lanka, the USS Charlotte, a Los Angeles–class nuclear-powered attack submarine, closed in on the IRIS Dena, a new Iranian Moudge-class frigate.
Key points- The US Navy has struck and sunk Iran’s unarmed IRIS Dena frigate
- The ongoing US–Iran war is not legal by domestic or international standards, drawing scrutiny to America’s actions
- Canada built its defence on interoperability with a US that followed rules-based order—but that might be gone now
Submerged, the Charlotte fired a heavyweight, acoustic-homing torpedo at the hull of the Dena. It missed. It fired another. It connected. The periscope footage of the attack was released by the United States Department of War. It shows the shockwave of the torpedo fracturing the Dena’s hull and sending its helicopter flight deck metres into the air.
Within seconds, what was left of the Dena was plummeting to the depths of the Indian Ocean, carrying at least sixty of its crew of 180 to their deaths.
Some moments later, an email was sent from US Indo-Pacific Command to Sri Lanka’s maritime rescue agency. Twenty miles from Galle’s coast, a ship is in distress.
Sri Lanka immediately engaged a search and rescue effort that included its air force and navy. The surface of the sea contained clues that a vessel had been attacked and had likely been sunk. But it was not clear whether the attack had come from above or below. They were able to rescue thirty-two sailors, and recover the bodies of eighty-seven others, many of whom had mysteriously broken legs.
The Charlotte had long vanished like an apparition beneath the waves.
This was on the fifth day of the US–Israeli war on Iran, 2,000 nautical miles from the immediate conflict zone.
Do we know who the good guys are here?
On the last day of February, without so much as a heads up to their traditional allies, or to the United Nations, the US and Israel launched devastating attacks on Iran’s leadership and military architecture. In the process, they destroyed a girl’s school with a Tomahawk missile and killed over 100 of its students. Their tiny bodies would be buried row by row in tiny graves.
The war isn’t legal by US domestic standards. Congress has the sole authority to declare war according to the US Constitution. It isn’t legal by international standards either. The UN Security Council must authorize a necessary and proportional response to an imminent threat. This was an unprovoked war of aggression. A dream come true for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a genocidal accused war criminal who has “longed” for this for forty years due to Iran’s support of terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah and their pursuit of nuclear weapons, which, for forty years, has been months or weeks away from being realized.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said that “no quarter” will be shown to Iran—“no mercy” as the US and Israel wage a campaign of “maximum lethality” under “maximum authorities on the battlefield.” Such a policy, a policy of annihilation, is also illegal under the Hague Convention, as well as US domestic laws.
In my youth, I spent a couple of years reading for a doctoral degree in international relations at the University of Toronto. The academic discipline of international relations, or IR, is the study of how power works in the international system. I earned my degree, but it was not until later, in 2008, when I saw firsthand, from the deck of the HMCS Iroquois, a US Arleigh Burke–class Aegis guided-missile destroyer, that I actually understood international power projection. The silhouette of that modern American destroyer, cruising off the coast of Iran in the Persian Gulf, was both menacing and mesmerizing.
US hard power must be witnessed to be comprehended. It is no exaggeration to say nothing like it has previously existed. But historically, this great power has been wielded in a manner constrained by the norms, rules, and values of an international system rooted in liberalism: open markets, human rights, multilateral co-operation.
Those guardrails are disappearing. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, instead used the sinking of the unarmed Dena as an occasion “to remind everyone that this is an incredible demonstration of America’s global reach to hunt, find, and kill an out-of-area destroyer [and] is something only the United States can do at this type of scale.”
President Donald Trump laughed about the premeditated incident a few days later, saying it was probably true that it was more fun to sink Iranian warships than to capture them.
Sometime in early February, the IRIS Dena would have left the Iranian Navy’s Southern Fleet base at Bandar Abbas to sail through the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman, and out into the Arabian Sea. It would travel past the Maldives islands on the southern tip of India’s west coast before rounding Sri Lanka and arriving in the Bay of Bengal. It would anchor, by invitation, in the Indian port of Visakhapatnam alongside eighteen other warships as part of its participation in an international fleet review that comprised seventy-five foreign delegations, including the United States, Germany, Japan, and Australia. The theme of the joint exercise: “United by Oceans.”
India had hoped to use the event as a “neutral ground for naval diplomacy. When the warships from different nations will anchor in the same harbour, it will signify a mutual respect for a rule-based maritime order.”
The Dena’s crew of cadet sailors would parade in their dress whites in front of grandstands full of onlookers and admirers, led out by their naval band of trumpeters and saxophonists and drummers, squared away and resplendent in the glimmering sunlight of their youth and last days. They would socialize and exercise with the crews from other participating navies. They would even take selfies at the Taj Mahal during the ten-day celebration that took place from February 15 to 25.
As a precondition of its participation in the fleet review and the Milan 2026 exercises in India, the IRIS Dena was unarmed. When it met what Secretary Hegseth boastfully called its “quiet death,” the IRIS Dena was essentially an off-duty vessel, travelling home from a ceremonial voyage on ocean waters that were declared, in 1971 by the UN General Assembly, a zone of peace.
The United States knew the IRIS Dena was unarmed, and it knew it’s approximate whereabouts, as it participated in the same exercise.
The US Navy left the survivors of their attack to drown. There was no attempt by the crew of the USS Charlotte to rescue their fellow seafarers, who posed no threat, from the depths. No “stupid rules of engagement”—as Secretary Hegseth calls them—could constrain US “war fighters.” “We fight to win, and we don’t waste time.” Saving the lives of the remaining crew of the IRIS Dena would have been just a waste of time according to this logic.
American legal scholars have made arguments in favour of the legality of the sinking. Some, like James Kraska, have said that it represented a lawful military objective, regardless of whether the Dena posed an imminent threat to US forces or was operating beyond the theatre of combat operations. They have explained away the lack of compliance with the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea Article 18 by suggesting that it doesn’t necessarily apply in the case of submarines that might be made vulnerable by surfacing or might not have the necessary room on board for hostages.
But none have commented on the ethics of the act because they know that there are few things more sinister than torpedoing an unarmed warship and leaving its crew to drown at sea. An unarmed warship that was known to be unarmed, 2,000 nautical miles from the conflict zone.
Canada’s defence concept has been built on a premise of who the good guys are. Interoperability—the capacity for two militaries to seamlessly combine across air, sea, and land domains in defence of the continent at home and in operations abroad—is the central logic upon which our defence posture and procurement decisions have been made for decades.
At its core, interoperability assumes the US is a benevolent hegemon. It imagines American power as guided by enlightenment values—equality, liberty, the dignity of all human beings. In international terms, these principles amount to a respect for the legal principle of the world order that has held since 1648: the absolute sovereignty of nation states.
In plain terms, it means Canada has long assumed the US would largely use its immense power to defend the rules of the system rather than bend, or even shatter, them for its own perceived advantage. It also means that, aligning our military with Washington, would reinforce, rather than undermine, the stability of that order.
That might be gone now. The case of the IRIS Dena is a moral prism through which to understand the Trump regime and Canada’s relation to it. It is the international equivalent of the murder of Renée Nicole Macklin Good and the murder of Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis at the hands of masked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. I submit it speaks to an inhumanity of the regime and a moral bankruptcy that is rapidly spiralling the international system into a chaos that we may find to be irrecoverable. Our interoperability with this regime is accordingly untenable—should we wish to remain true to our own liberal, democratic ethos.
The inverse of interoperability is what the Finns, the Swedes, the Danes, and the Norwegians refer to as a “total defence” concept. Total defence concedes the threat is on the doorstep and takes a whole-society approach to defending the country from external intervention. Total defence combines professional military forces with trained civil actors and the active participation of entire communities as deterrence against potential aggressor states.
The Finns, who neighbour Russia, have an aphorism that describes their total defence concept: even the biggest bear will not eat a porcupine.
There is an Anglican hymn, written in 1860 by William Whiting, that derives from the human helplessness described in Psalm 107. “Eternal Father Strong to Save” is also known as the Navy Hymn. It sings of the shared experience of all sailors when they find themselves in the throes of the awesome power of the ocean and how “they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distress.”
The hymn that has been sung at the funerals of numerous US presidents, and has concluded many Sunday services at the US Naval Academy, was amongst the favourites of both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The last line of the first stanza—“O hear us when we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea”—will be familiar to millions.
I thought of that line when I imagined the surviving members of the IRIS Dena, legs shattered, flailing in the Indian Ocean, unarmed, entirely vulnerable, left for dead. I thought of it again during Hegseth’s prepared remarks delivered to the press corps on Friday, March 13, when he triumphantly described that, with the Israeli Air Force, over 15,000 enemy targets had been struck. “Looking up, the IRGC and Iranian regime see only two things on the side of aircraft: the stars and stripes and the Star of David, the evil regime’s worst nightmare.”
He concluded by saying, “We know who the good guys are here, and the American people do too.”
Do we?
The post The US Torpedoed an Unarmed Ship. Who Are the Good Guys Again? first appeared on The Walrus.
Unpublished Newswire
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