Why Iran's naval tactics work, by those who fought them last time

[Celerity]

The might of the US navy should be overwhelming, but Tehran’s use of fast, concealed coastal craft in the Gulf’s narrow waters gives small boats a big advantage

https://www.thetimes.com/world/middle-east/article/iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-boats-b2k3xq00d

https://archive.li/iowF6


Images released by the IRGC last month show military exercises with small craft in the Strait of Hormuz
SEPAH NEWS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has turned the tables on President Trump’s “fire and fury” campaign. The Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil passes, is blocked. Tankers and cargo vessels are on fire. The navy section of the force has struck back with its most effective revenge card. Now, the third tanker war in four decades has scuppered Trump’s hopes of declaring victory against Iran in the near future.


The Mayuree Naree, a Thai cargo ship, was struck in the strait this week
ROYAL THAI NAVY/AP

Despite the massive destruction caused by US and Israeli bombers since the war began on Saturday, February 28, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) still has the capacity and the skills to drag the whole of the Middle East into the conflict. Not so much with its short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles, and not even with its long-range drones, although all have caused fear and damage across the region, but by its combat-proven ability to send across the Gulf waterway explosives-laden drone boats, fast attack craft armed with missiles and sea-skimming cruise missiles from concealed coastal launchers.

It is the IRGC navy’s asymmetric warfare versus America’s mighty armada of aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers and Tomahawk-armed submarines. “Iran learnt this lesson in the 1980s during the first tanker war, that if you have a conventional navy it’s vulnerable if you come up against the US navy, so they went asymmetric and relied on cheap, small, in-shore craft that could cause a lot of damage. They didn’t require naval facilities and could just pop out, carry out an attack and go back into hiding,” said the retired Royal Navy vice-admiral Duncan Potts, much of whose career was spent in the Gulf facing daily threats from the IRGC.


Iran is using mines, drones and jet skis to choke the supply of oil through the waterway
GALLO IMAGES/ORBITAL HORIZON/COPERNICUS SENTINEL DATA

During the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, Iraq tried to disrupt Iran’s oil exports, and Tehran retaliated by attacking ships in the Gulf associated with Baghdad’s trading partners. Iraq responded with its own tanker war. More than 400 ships were attacked, 239 of them oil tankers. Many countries were forced to send warships to guard the shipping route, including the US, the UK (operating the Royal Navy’s Armilla patrol), the Soviet Union and France. Potts, who is president of the Royal Naval Association, said Admiral Brad Cooper, the American in command of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, was well versed in IRGC tactics because he used to be commander of the US Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain.

snip

[spanone]

1. K&R

[Stuckinthebush]

2. Jet skis?!

That seems like a suicide mission!