USS Stark

USS Stark (FFG-31) was a US Navy Oliver Hazard Perry-class guided-missile frigate that was struck by two Iraqi Air Force Exocet anti-ship missiles on 17 May 1987 in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War. The attack killed 37 US sailors and severely damaged the ship. Despite the strike coming from an Iraqi — not Iranian — aircraft, the incident became a landmark event in the history of US naval engagement rules and proportionality doctrine in the Gulf.

The Reagan administration's measured response — accepting Iraq's claim of mistaken identity rather than treating it as a casus belli — established a legal and political precedent for proportional response in Gulf incidents. The Iraqi Exocets were AM39 air-launched variants fired from a Mirage F1 aircraft; the Stark's crew did not activate its Phalanx close-in weapon system in time. The incident triggered significant reviews of US Navy defensive protocols.

In the May 2026 tanker-war context, the USS Stark was cited by analysts as the foundational precedent for why the US does not automatically escalate every attack on naval or commercial vessels in the Gulf into a full military response. The smokestack-bombing tactic used against Iranian tankers was explicitly designed to stay below the escalatory threshold that the Stark incident's proportional response framework demarcated.