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I’m amazed how many arm chair experts have suddenly discovered submarines this week and think they’ve uncovered a war crime.Let’s get something straight.Submarines exist for one purpose: to sink ships. Quietly. From underwater. With torpedoes. That’s not a scandal. That’s literally the job description.Ok, maybe a modern sub has two, maybe three reasons. But I'm not going to talk about those.When submarines first appeared around 1900, the old-school surface navy hated them. They thought it was dishonourable to attack a ship without warning. In 1901 the British First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, called submarine warfare “underhanded, unfair and damned un-English” and said their crews should be treated like pirates if captured.Submariners responded the only way sailors know how — with sarcasm.In 1914, after torpedoing a German cruiser, the British submarine HMS E9 sailed back into harbour flying a Jolly Roger. The message was simple:If you’re going to call us pirates, we’ll fly the pirate flag. And that tradition stuck.For over a century submarines have raised the Jolly Roger after a successful patrol. Not as a joke. As a quiet acknowledgement that they did exactly what submarines are designed to do.Which brings us to the current outrage cycle.A U.S. submarine recently sank an Iranian warship with a torpedo in the Indian Ocean — the first confirmed U.S. submarine kill of an enemy ship since World War II.Cue the internet lawyers shouting “war crimes” because the attack was… wait for it… stealthy.Yes. Correct.That’s called submarine warfare.It has worked exactly like this for more than a hundred years. A submarine detects a warship, fires a torpedo, and the warship sinks. That’s the entire concept.The irony is almost perfect. The same criticism people are throwing around today — that it’s sneaky, unfair, underhanded — is word-for-word the same complaint admirals were making in 1901.And submariners answered that complaint a century ago.With the Jolly Roger 🏴‍☠️