There was a similar AQD attack on the USS The Sullivans (same ship class!) in January of 2000- BEFORE the Cole was bombed in October of 2000. This was not a surprise tactic and it should have been an indicator of things to come. The Sullivans attack failed because someone was clearly a believer in "more is better." The boat was so overladen with explosives that it sank. Ironically, those same explosives were salvaged and put to use against the Cole seven months later.
Asymmetric warfare doesn't require completely destroying a target. There is the concept of a mission-kill, meaning the target may not be obliterated, but it is unable to complete it's primary purpose. The Cole was definitely a solid mission kill - she had to travel home on the well deck of a salvage carrier. It was also a blow to perceived supremacy - it was shown as an example of how vulnerable US forces could be.
No offense, but do you know exactly what lethality of distance 400 LBS of of homogenous modern explosive has? Let's use the typical "Gouge" (slang for quick reference materials) for a close-air support (CAS) spotter on the ground. For an air-dropped Mk 82 500lb bomb (assume fused for ground contact, not airburst -this makes it equivalent to the minimum size delivered to the Cole), any explosion inside of 245 meters in proximity to friendly troops is considered Danger Close - meaning there's a 1:1000 chance someone's going to get hurt who isn't the target. Troops CRINGE at Danger Close calls. It's almost guaranteed someone who is friendly is going to get hurt. 105 meters (close to your estimate) means 1:10 chance someone's going to get hurt who isn't the target, better than playing the Lotto! And that's assuming everyone's under some form of effective cover (foxhole, bunker, shallow grave/fighting position). If you go with the pessimistic scenario, that it was closer to a 1000 LBS of explosive, that's a Mk 83 and the numbers work out to about 300m and 115-125m respectively. It's not a linear equation.
Now imagine that going off at 100m, surface burst, with personnel outside the skin of the ship or near open hatches and portholes facing the blast. Unlike the grunts, they're not under effective cover. Had the intent been anti-personnel rather than pure destructive contact power, they would have found a way to surround the core of the explosive with some sort of shrapnel - screws, nails, bolts, what have you. 100m, 10m, it wouldn't have mattered. The Yemenis or whoever was covering the perimeter should have known beforehand *exactly* which boats were cleared for provisioning and only those vessels are allowed to enter the perimeter. The Force Protection plan failed because one of the components (host nation) was either incompetent, corrupt or both.
If the FP team had fired on the vessel before it came in lethal range, one of two things would have happened - 1) a sympathetic explosion as the incoming fire detonates the bomb or the attackers blow it up themselves in the hope of doing damage to something valuable or 2) the attackers are neutralized and subsequent investigations show the vessel is a floating bomb. News at 11, but either way, it would have been a sympathetic clip given the evidence. Video doesn't lie after all.
Riiiight....
