Iran’s navy is far from finished at the Strait of Hormuz and the US knows it
Neil MacFarquhar
Iranian warships sunk by U.S. and Israeli strikes crowd naval ports along the Persian Gulf coast, but what is sometimes called the “mosquito fleet” lurks in the shadows.
The fleet of small, fast and agile boats designed to intercept shipping forms the heart of the naval forces deployed by the Revolutionary Guard, separate from Iran’s regular navy.
These boats, and especially the missiles and drones that the Guard Navy could launch from them or from camouflaged areas on the coast, became the main threat hindering shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran had promised to keep the strait closed until a ceasefire was reached in Lebanon. Senior Iranian officials on Friday gave conflicting statements about whether the ceasefire prompted Iran to open the strait. On Saturday, the Iranian military said the waterway had “returned to its previous state” and was “under the strict management and control of the armed forces.”
Welcoming Iran’s first announcement regarding the opening, US President Donald Trump declared that the Hormuz issue was “over” and emphasized on social media that the US blockade of Iranian ports would continue until a peace agreement was reached.
The task of keeping the strait closed would fall to the Guard navy.
“The Revolutionary Guard navy operates more like a guerrilla force at sea,” said Saeid Golkar, a Guards expert and professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
“There is a particular focus on asymmetric warfare in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” he added. “So instead of relying on large warships and classic naval battles, it is necessary to rely on hit-and-run attacks.”
At least 20 ships were attacked during the war, according to the International Maritime Agency, a United Nations agency. Analysts say the attacks were likely carried out by drones fired from mobile launchers on the ground, creating a faint footprint that is difficult to trace.
On April 8, after a two-week ceasefire in the war was declared, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said that more than 90 percent of the regular navy fleet, including the main warships, were at the bottom of the ocean.
Caine said an estimated half of the Guardian Navy’s fast attack boats were also sunk, but he did not specify how many. Estimates of the total number range from hundreds to thousands; It is difficult to count them.
The boats are often too small to be visible on satellite images and are moored along piers in deep caves dug along the rocky coastline, ready to be deployed within minutes, analysts said. Their arsenal poses a major threat to commercial shipping.
“It remains a disruptive force,” said Adm. Gary Roughead, retired U.S. Naval Operations chief. “You never quite knew what they were up to and what their intentions were.”
Guard ground forces were created immediately after the 1979 Islamic Revolution because its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, did not trust the regular army to protect the new government.
The guard navy was added about 1986. Farzin Nadimi, a Guard navy expert at the Washington Institute, a policy think tank in the US capital, said the regular navy was reluctant to attack oil tankers belonging to Iraq’s financial backers Kuwait and Saudi Arabia during the Iran-Iraq war.
Eventually these attacks accelerated and the United States deployed warships to escort the tankers. One of them, USS Samuel B. Roberts, nearly sank after hitting an Iranian mine. In a later war, the US Navy sank two Iranian frigates and many other naval ships.
Three years later, Iranians watched the United States decimate the Iraqi army during the First Persian Gulf War. Nadimi said that this combination of events convinced Iran that it could never prevail in a conflict with the US military, so it developed a secret force to harass shipping in the Gulf.
He said the Guard navy has an estimated 50,000 men and has divided its forces into five sectors across the Gulf, including some assets on most of the 38 Gulf islands that Iran controls.
Overall, it has built at least 10 well-hidden, fortified bases for its attack boats. One of them, Farur, is the operations center for the marine special forces, whose entire equipment, right down to the sunglasses, is modeled on its U.S. counterparts.
“The Revolutionary Guard navy has always believed that it was at the forefront of the fight against the Great Satan and has been in constant conflict with the Americans in the Gulf,” Nadimi said.
Navy analysts said Iran has begun using recreational boats equipped with rocket-propelled grenades or machine guns. Over the years it has produced a number of specially designed small boats, as well as miniature submarines and marine drones. Iran claims some of these boats can exceed 100 knots, or 180 km/h, experts said.
The Guard navy has recently developed larger, more complex warships, many of which have been targeted in combat, said Alex Pape, chief maritime expert for defense analyst Janes. Among those damaged was the largest drone ship, Shahid Bagheri, a converted container ship that can also launch anti-ship missiles.
To counter a potential swarm of smaller boats, U.S. warships have high-caliber guns and other weapons, experts said. However, commercial ships have no way of fending off such attacks.
But Nicholas Carl, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, said the Iranians have never tried swarm attacks on small boats in combat.
Since Trump imposed a naval blockade of ships arriving from Iranian ports on Monday, even the most powerful US warships have avoided spending time patrolling near the narrow Strait of Hormuz. Experts said there was little room for maneuver and virtually no warning time to evade a drone or missile fired at close range.
U.S. warships enforcing the blockade will likely remain outside the strait, in the Gulf of Oman or even further afield in the Arabian Sea, where they can monitor shipping traffic but where it is much harder for the Guard to attack, experts said. Iran on Wednesday warned that it could expand operations through its proxy force in Yemen to the Red Sea, another key shipping route in the region.
A long history of confrontation
The Guard navy has long been playing cat-and-mouse games with the US military in the Persian Gulf. Roughead recalls that in the 1990s and 2000s, small attack ships approached American warships at high speed, then changed direction when they were 800 meters away.
He said drone warfare increases the danger level. Cheap and sometimes difficult to detect, drones can cause significant damage to a warship worth billions of dollars.
At times, the Guard fleet has engaged in direct conflict with American or other forces. Two small US navy boats were captured in early 2016. The 10 sailors who were filmed on their knees were later released unharmed. This incident caused great repercussions in the USA.
Brigadier General Mohammed Nazeri, the founder of the Guard Navy special forces, who led this attack, has achieved cult status in Iran. It inspired a reality program on public television. CommanderIt ran for five seasons.
Each season, approximately 30 contestants competed for the chance to become a Marine commando. They demonstrated survival skills or daring feats such as jumping off cliffs into the Gulf. After each round, viewers voted for their favorite “hero”.
This article was first published on: New York Times.
