Weapons hospital ships

According to media reports, the hospital ship USNS Comfort, prior to her deployment in the course of the 2003 international armed conflict between Iraq and the United States, was equipped with weapons like. 30-cal. and. 50-cal machine guns [...], exclusively for defence, to fend off attacks by swarming, heavily armed speed boats or suicide craft see Sirak 2003. 

General H. Norman Schwarzkopf took the chemical threat extremely seriously. Anxious about the safety of his men, he did not share the confident expectations of low casualty rates as expressed by some civilian commentators and medical officers. In planning for possible casualties of 10,000 to 20,000, he admitted that The possibility of mass casualties from chemical weapons was the main reason we had sixty-three hospitals, two hospital ships, and eighteen thousand beds ready in the war zone. Even if this constituted over-insurance, as in many other aspects of the preparations for Operation Desert Storm, he could neither anticipate that the Iraqis would pursue a passive and ineffectual strategy nor that the likely victory would prove so crushingly one-sided. 

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