US President Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning that he had told the United States Navy to "shoot down and destroy" Iranian gunboats that "harass" US ships. "I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea," Trump tweeted. "We're not going to stand for it. If they do that that's putting our ships in danger and our great crews and sailors in danger - I'm not going to let that happen. And we will - they'll shoot them out of the water," he said during a White House briefing. "That's a threat. When they get that close to our boat, and they have guns, they have very substantial weapons on those boats, but we'll shoot them out of the water."
Senior Pentagon officials said Trump's comments were meant as a warning to Tehran but suggested that the US military would continue to abide by their existing right to self defence instead of changing their rules. "The president issued an important warning to the Iranians, what he was emphasising is all of our ships retain the right of self-defence," Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist told reporters at the Pentagon. On Sunday, the Revolutionary Guard acknowledged it had a tense encounter last week with US warships in the Gulf, but alleged without offering evidence that US forces sparked the incident.
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