This Ralph Peters appears to be a military polemicist and former cold war warrior who is making an awful lot of money writing an awful lot of p1ss & wind articles in the US press.
He knows cock-all about the RoE the RN/RM Boarding Party were operating under, or what orders they had regarding the possibility of capture by Iran.
If the officers on the spot judge that confessing to being on the wrong side of a line will have a better chance of getting them and their troops out than the pig's @rse the US made of their Iranian hostage crisis, then good luck to them.