Guerrilla War At Sea
We have been told that the Iranian Navy has been destroyed. In a conventional sense, that is true. Unfortunately, this is not a conventional war. The Iranians are now employing swarms of speedboats to attack commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf. These boats don’t stand much of a chance against the U.S. Navy. They are, unfortunately, a real threat to large unarmed merchant vessels.
Many of the boats in question are modified commercial or even recreational vessels. A number, however, were purpose-built for military use. They operate at high speed, have shallow drafts, low radar signatures, and good maneuverability.
No one knows how many of these vessels there are. Some estimates are in the thousands. What we know for sure, though, is that hundreds of them have appeared at a time in recent weeks in the Persian Gulf.
These attack boats are armed with heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, anti-ship missiles, shoulder-fired missiles, and sometimes mines or explosive charges for suicide-style attacks. Some carry drones or serve as motherships for unmanned explosive boats. Often their attacks are coordinated with shore-based missiles, drones, and larger patrol boats. They can operate in large swarms numbering in the dozens or even hundreds that launch attacks from multiple directions.
“The IRGC navy works more like a guerrilla force at sea,” says Saeid Golkar, an expert on the Guards and a political science professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “It is focused on asymmetrical warfare, especially in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” he added. “So instead of relying on big warships and classic naval battles, it depends on hit-and-run attacks.”
These boats are based in camouflaged sites onshore. The boats are often too small to appear on satellite images, and they are moored at piers within deep caves excavated along the rocky coastline, ready to be deployed in minutes, analysts say.
It is believed that Iran has constructed at least 10 well-hidden, fortified bases for attack boats. One, Farur, is the center of operations for the naval special forces, whose equipment is modeled on their U.S. counterparts.
Al Aawsat
Many of these bases are inside purpose-built caves. Inside these shelters, the attack boats are protected from strikes and can still be launched in minutes.
All this may seem fantastic, but the reality is that these swarms of small boats are having an outsized impact on the war. On Thursday, a ship anchored off the United Arab Emirates was seized and taken toward Iran, and another was attacked and sunk. Per the British military, the seized vessel is now heading toward Iranian territorial waters.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said it had received reports that the vessel was taken by unauthorized personnel while anchored 38 nautical miles (70 kilometers, 44 miles) northeast of the UAE port of Fujairah, near the Strait of Hormuz. Indian authorities also announced that an Indian-flagged cargo ship sank off the coast of Oman after an attack sparked a fire aboard the vessel. Fujairah is an important oil export terminal and the UAE’s main port outside of the Persian Gulf. Vessels loading oil there in effect have bypassed the impasse at the Straits of Hormuz.
There is no sign that this problem is abating. As this article was being written, the maritime intelligence firm Windward reported 333 IRGC speedboats active in the Persian Gulf at one time. One swarm alone consisted of 122 separate craft.
We won the conventional war against Iran in a military sense a long time ago. That is now largely irrelevant. The Iranians have shifted the war into a contest over the control of Middle Eastern oil and gas. They are holding the world’s economy hostage, and they are fighting a guerrilla war at sea to do so.
I'm not sure we have the right scorecards here.
Back in the late 90's I sold some commercial, airborne maritime surveillance radars to the Australian Coast Watch contractor. The specs were all commercial, hence exportable without special permission.
One of the crew operators told me one day they spotted a target at 30 nautical miles and got curious because the signature seemed small and odd. The plane flew over low enough to ID it - a floating, dead pelican carcass, or at least part of one. Same crew regularly spotted individual floating beer cans at nearly 20 nm.
In 2022 an Australian defense magazine wrote that its next gen commercial radar, same maker, can detect and track small wooden boats in high sea states at 50 miles. That commercial technology is about 20 years old and not sensitive enough to be controlled export equipment.
The Persian Gulf is almost certainly surveilled 24x7 by US Navy P8s (converted Boeing B737 NexGen a/c) and Triton UAS maritime patrol aircraft. Their maritime patrol radars and other sensors have classified capabilities but let's assume they are better, probably much more capable than the commercial radars used by Australian Coastwatch etc. They have modes optimized to detect and classify targets as small as submarine periscopes at range. Among the many different modes of operation, I'm pretty sure that one or more will detect suicidal IRGC swarm boats.
There are other US platforms that have such capabilities without including satellites, including SH-60 antisubmarine / antisurface helicopters found on many US warships.
The point?
There are games afoot here - whether the US is getting targeting info for those hidden bases, or allowing the pinpricks to goad the GCC states into action, I won't hazard to say.
There is more than meets the eye here.
But someone is in the game.
To help eliminate the Iranians use of small speedboat, I think the US should carpet bomb the entire coastline of Iran with a width of that bombing maybe 10 miles.