The U.S. Navy has used a fighter jet to disable an oil tanker.

Read that sentence again, because it is the kind of thing that simply does not happen in normal years. On 6 May 2026, an F/A-18E Super Hornet, operating from a U.S. Navy carrier in the Gulf of Oman, lined up on the rudder of a tanker called the M/T Hasna and opened fire with its M61 Vulcan cannon — a six-barrel, 20mm Gatling gun spinning 6,000 rounds a minute. A few seconds of fire was enough. The Hasna’s steering went, the ship slowed to a drift, and CENTCOM put out a press release that read like an action film synopsis.

The point of the strike was to keep the tanker from reaching Iran. Officially, the United States is enforcing a maritime quarantine that has been in place since the start of Project Freedom. In practice, this is the first time in living memory a Western fighter has strafed a civilian-flagged ship to physically prevent it from continuing on its course.

Why a fighter and not a destroyer

The first question every aviation reader should be asking is: why use a Super Hornet for this?

The answer is precision and speed. A destroyer’s five-inch gun is designed to sink a ship, not to cripple it without sinking it. CENTCOM clearly wanted the M/T Hasna alive — drifting, helpless, and unable to make port — but not on the bottom of the Gulf with a humanitarian disaster on top of it. A 20mm cannon, fired in short bursts at the rudder of a slow-moving tanker, lets you do exactly that. You destroy the steering. You leave the hull, the cargo, and the crew intact.

It is also fast. A Super Hornet can be on top of a target eighty miles away inside ten minutes. A destroyer might take an hour. The difference matters when a tanker is making a final dash for Iranian territorial waters.

The maths of a strafing run

The M61 Vulcan does not, despite its name, fire continuously the way movies suggest. The Super Hornet carries 412 rounds, which gives the pilot just under five seconds of total trigger-down time. In practice, a real engagement involves bursts of half a second to a second, fired from a shallow strafing dive at maybe 400 knots and 1,500 feet of slant range.

The pilot of the Hasna engagement would have rolled in on the stern of the tanker, lined up the head-up display so the gun cross sat over the rudder, squeezed the trigger for less than a second, and pulled off. The HUD video, which the Pentagon will probably never release, would show the ship’s own wake erupting white as 20mm shells stitched a line across the rudder housing. Then the wake would change shape — the unmistakable spreading curve of a vessel with no steering — and the Super Hornet would be back at five thousand feet on its way home.

Where this fits in the bigger picture

This is the latest, and the most kinetic, escalation of the U.S. blockade-style operation against shipping headed for Iran. Earlier in the same week, U.S. Navy MH-60 helicopters and Army AH-64 Apaches sank six Iranian fast-attack boats off the same coastline. The pattern is a deliberate move from low-intensity intercepts — boarding parties, sanctions, and warning shots — to direct kinetic action against vessels that refuse to comply.

For the Super Hornet, the engagement is also a quiet reminder that the gun, which fighter pilots have spent forty years being told they will never use, is in fact still very useful when the rules of engagement require something between a warning and a missile.

What happens to the Hasna

The tanker is, at the time of writing, drifting in international waters under U.S. Navy escort. Iran has lodged a formal protest. The cargo — a few hundred thousand barrels of crude — will likely be moved or sold under U.S. control. The crew is reportedly unharmed.

And somewhere in the ready room aboard the carrier that launched the strike, a young naval aviator is now the answer to a trivia question that did not exist on Tuesday: who was the last U.S. Navy pilot to disable a ship with a fighter’s gun?

Sources: U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) press release, The Aviationist, Reuters.