Two U.S. Military officials have told FOX News that on Monday, the U.S.S. Mahan had a near confrontation with an Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG) “fast attack craft”. The officials said that the craft, which is normally armed with several machine guns and rocket propelled grenades (RPG’s) at one point came within 1000 yards of the Navy ship while it was in international waters in the Persian Gulf.

The officials said that as the Iranian vessel closed within 1,000 yards of the guided missile destroyer. At that point the USS Mahan sounded General Quarters and confronted the boat with its weapons manned. They added that it was necessary for the Mahan to alter it’s course to avoid the Iranian warship and that they sounded the danger signal and fired flares in an attempt to warn the other vessel off.

Officials sad that at no point did the IRG craft come closer than 1,000 yards and so no warning shots other than the flares were fired. One of the officials told FOX News: “Coming inbound at a high rate of speed like that and manning weapons, despite clear warnings from the ship, is obviously provocative behavior,” describing the Iranian actions.

This incident has become normal behavior for the emboldened Iranian military. In fact, it was necessary for the USS Mahan to fire warning shots at four of the Iranian gunboats near the Strait of Hormuz during a similar incident. At that time, the Mahan tried to order the boats to stop via bridge-to-bridge radio communication. But the crews of the IRG boat refused to acknowledge the verbal warning which resulted in the commander of the destroyer to fire three warning shots with a .50 caliber machine gun at the group.

Official records show that in the last year of the weak kneed Obama administration, Iran launched some 35 unprovoked harassment incidents aimed at U.S. Navy warships. The incidents officially classified as “unprofessional interactions” represented an increase of more than 50 percent over those in 2015.

The following are just a few of the more serious examples of the embarrassment the U.S. Navy suffered under the cowardly Obama administration during that period:

• In late November, an Iranian “Fast Boat” in the Strait of Hormuz trained a machine gun on a U.S. Navy helicopter.
• In September, Iran threatened to shoot down Navy aircraft it said was encroaching on its airspace.
• In early September, seven Iranian boats harassed a U.S. Navy ship in the Persian Gulf.
• But the most sever incident of all occurred in January when a flotilla of IRG boats seized two United States Navy Riverine Command Boats and took the crew members hostage after one of the boats suffered engine problems and was carried into Iranian waters. The crew was humiliated and was not released until Obama agreed to pay a ransom for them.