So the Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine Hartford and the Navy LPD New Orleans (which is an amphibious dock ship, meaning essentially it can launch and recover amphibious boats for landings:

Improved LIFT - strategic and tactical - is critical to the sustainment of power projection operations. The SAN ANTONIO class is the functional replacement for four classes of less capable amphibious ships equipped with 1970's and early 1980's technology, including its predecessor, the USS AUSTIN (LPD-4) class. Each LPD-17 class ship has 25,000 square feet of vehicle storage space, similar to the larger WASP (LHD-1) class multi-purpose assault ship and double that of the LPD-4.

The LPD-17 ships are the first amphibious ships designed to accommodate the Marine Corps' "mobility triad" - Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicles (AAAV), Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC), and the Marine Corps' new tilt-rotor MV-22 Osprey - for high-speed, long-range tactical-lift operations. Just as "littoral" has come to mean operations that begin well "over-the-horizon" (OTH), as far as 600 miles from an adversary's coastline, the "mobility triad" will ensure our ability to "reach out and touch someone" hundreds of miles inland, at revolutionary speeds.

They collide.

Running into one of these can ruin your whole day:

And no, it doesn't help if this is what you're driving:

As you may imagine, this is not a good thing. The best possible news out of this wreck is that the sub's power plant sustained no damage. Its crew were not so lucky, and nor was the sub's sail, with its sensitive and expensive equipment.

Reuters reports shipping in the Strait wasn't disrupted by or after the wreck. Howsomesoever, comma ... with 15 sailors hurt aboard, and the sail damaged, the sub's commander is more than likely in more trouble than one Naval career can sustain.

Prayers, if you be so inclined, please, for all the folks on both these vessels -- not to mention the folks, fishes and others in the vicinity, because the New Orleans' fuel tank was gutted, sending a boatload (literally) of diesel fuel marine into the already anything-but-pristine Hormuz.

This is what the sub looks like, after:

There are a couple different ways something like this can happen. The obvious one is that the sub ran in under the ship; the not-so-obvious one is that the ship, which didn't know the sub was nearby, backed or banked into the sub while it was at less-than periscope-depth. Either way, the sub commander's in a world of hurt, and his injured sailors and their seaborne home aren't going to be mission-effective for a long time.

Both these vessels are reported underway on their own power following the collision. Repairs to the San Antonio-class LPD and the 688I-class submarine will doubtless require an investment in time, labor and materials. Even in economic times as dire as ours, it's no easy task to run a war on the far side of the planet; running two at once at that distance, particularly using a Rumsfeld-renovated US military, is just unrealistic.

Dear Mr. President, please join me in supporting our troops as fully as possible. Bring them home. All of them. Now.