Iran's Close Encounters With the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf
Jonathan Ruhe, Blake Fleisher
Iranian Naval Activity, Persian Gulf
The IRGC Navy has a sizable fleet of relatively small, high speed and highly-maneuverable attack craft.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is stepping up its harassment of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf. In the past few weeks, U.S. ships had to swerve and fire warning shots on separate occasions to avoid colliding with oncoming Iranian ships. The U.S. Navy recorded 31 such instances of "unsafe and/or unprofessional interactions" by Iran in the first half of this year, compared to 23 in all of 2015. The increase corresponds to the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program in January, but this is not just a game of chicken to test U.S. resolve in the wake of the deal. More importantly, these incidents are live-fire maneuvers for Iran’s larger strategy to contest U.S. predominance in the Persian Gulf.
This strategy is called anti-access/area denial (A2/AD). Anti-access prevents enemy forces from projecting power into a theater of operations, while area denial degrades the enemy’s ability to operate once in that theater. In other words, don’t let your enemy get into your front yard, but if it does, wear it down.
Iran has been actively developing such a strategy for the Persian Gulf. Since Operation Praying Mantis in 1988, where the United States wiped out half of Iran’s navy in an afternoon, Tehran understands the prohibitive costs of trying to confront superior U.S. conventional forces head-to-head. Since then, the Iranians have focused instead on asymmetric capabilities and tactics pitting their own forces’ strengths against U.S. vulnerabilities.
First, the IRGC Navy has a sizable fleet of relatively small, high speed and highly-maneuverable attack craft. Many of these are equipped to fire rocket, mortar or torpedo barrages, and others are packed with explosives to ram enemy vessels. When converging from multiple directions into a swarm, Iran’s attack craft can overwhelm much larger and slower U.S. naval ships around the Gulf.
These small vessels exploit geography to complicate detection and tracking, using the element of surprise to further level the playing field with U.S. forces. As a global energy chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz and surrounding waters are crowded with tankers and other commercial vessels, which could inadvertently screen converging swarms and hamper radar detection. Additionally, many IRGC bases for launching such attacks are concealed by rocky islands dotting Iran’s coast and the Strait.
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