The sinking of IRIS Dena: A quiet death of the rules-based order

The sinking of IRIS Dena — unarmed, post-exercise, in a neutral state’s waters — exposed a doctrine of impunity, and the quiet death of the rules-based order.

At 05:08 local time, in international waters 40 nautical miles south of Galle, Sri Lanka, a Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo — one of two fired, with the first missing its mark — struck the IRIS Dena beneath her keel. She was returning from India’s MILAN 2026 multinational naval exercise at Visakhapatnam as an officially invited guest, and was unarmed in accordance with the exercise’s return-voyage protocol.

She had 180 crew members aboard. At least 87 are now confirmed dead, another 32 were rescued and about 60 people were likely unaccounted for, Sri Lankan ​authorities said. The vessel was approximately 1,700 nautical miles from Iran’s nearest coastline and over 1,350 nautical miles from the nearest active theatre of Operation Epic Fury.

The submarine that sank her — identified by CBS News, citing multiple officials, as USS Charlotte, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine — left the area without conducting search and rescue operations. The Sri Lankan Navy recovered survivors and bodies from the water alone.

A quiet death

Pete Hegseth called it a “quiet death.” He was describing a torpedo strike. Without realising it, he was also eulogising something larger — the rules-based international order that the United States and its partners spent 80 years constructing and now appear, with evident satisfaction, to be dismantling.

What “quiet death” reveals is not a military assessment but a doctrine: we can do this, anywhere, to anyone, and frame it as dominance rather than law.

Across independent polls conducted after the strikes on Iran, roughly 60 per cent of Americans opposed the campaign. Support was concentrated almost entirely among self-identified MAGA Republicans, whose fragile enthusiasm Donald Trump acknowledged by invoking the “silent majority.”

This operation was not calibrated for America. It was not calibrated for the world. It was calibrated for a base.