Comment by mrandish
5 hours ago
I don't know enough about the current state of naval warfare but I've assumed this is related to the asymmetry that's emerged around protecting capital warships, especially in the scenario of a very narrow strait and a long enemy-controlled coastline. They can shoot relatively low-cost, short-range guided missiles from anywhere along the coast. Even if a warship stops the vast majority of them, only one has to get through to sink a multi-billion dollar ship that takes a decade to replace.
There are now similar asymmetries emerging across war-fighting and even though warships can still be effective (and less vulnerable) in other scenarios, this specific one seems especially bad. The other factor is that most of what ships carry through the straight isn't going directly to the U.S. so the impact on the U.S. is mostly secondary, reducing the risk the U.S. is willing to take. Of course, all this was known beforehand by military strategists which makes this all look even worse for the U.S. administration.
The bigger issue is the tankers. The US Navy isn't going to be happy patrolling the strait sure, but even if they did they wouldn't be able to protect the tankers enough for it to make sense for tankers to take the risk.
The last time this happened the US opened the strait by accidentally shooting down an Iranian passenger plane after sinking a large chunk of Iranian navy. The Iranians assumed the US shoot the passenger plane down on intentionally as a war crime and assumed the US would was planning to escalate the conflict. This fear deterred further Iranian attacks on tankers.
This isn't going to work this time because the US started the war by performing of the most serious escalations possible, a decapitation strike against top Iranian leadership in a surprise attack using a diplomatic negotiation as cover. The US did this while the strait was open and Iran was considering a peace deal.
Threats of escalation are no longer effective at deterring Iran because Iran now believes the US will take such actions regardless of what Iran does. What does Iranian leadership have to lose by staying the course? Very little. On the other hand if Iranian leadership back down, they loose all their leverage, they look weak internally, they look weak externally and the US might decide to attack them out of the blue again.
This is why decapitation strikes are generally not done. They remove options and they undermine deterrence and paint belligerents into a corner.
On a much smaller scale, this is advice I give to just about everyone: If your decisions won't affect how they treat you, then just do what you want. The fact that they won't like it doesn't matter, they didn't like you before.
Modern US surface warships such as the DDG-52 Arleigh Burke class are pretty survivable. The Iranians (and their Houthi proxies) have made sustained attacks on them and don't seem to have hit anything. And a single hit would be highly unlikely to sink such as vessel: we're not talking about something like the Russian Moskva cruiser that was crewed by drunks and had inoperative defensive systems.
The real problem is that there are too few such vessels to sustain convoy escort operations. Each destroyer can only provide area air defense for a handful of merchant vessels, and they can only stay on station for a few days at a time before they have to cycle out to refuel, rearm, and conduct critical maintenance. Some of the key munitions also appear to running low. And it appears that the other Gulf states are refusing to allow use of their facilities over fears of Iranian retaliation.
Other countries generally aren't really in a position to assist as part of a coalition either. They either don't have sufficiently capable warships at all, or lack the logistics train to sustain them in the Persian Gulf / Gulf of Oman region. After the Cold War a lot of countries like the UK and Germany essentially dismantled their navies so that they now exist only as government jobs programs.
Assisting the US with regard to Iran is phenomenally unpopular. The increase in energy prices isn't outweighing people's desire not to have their country assist.
And yet national leaders do phenomenally unpopular things all the time when they decide it's necessary. In this particular case it's mostly moot because none of the other impacted countries really has the capability to act regardless of popularity or lack thereof. Like the UK chose to spend all of their money on nationalized healthcare instead of the military. I don't mean that in a critical or negative way, on balance that might have been the right choice for them. But that choice does constrain their options in a crisis.
3 replies →
Is it even worth to escort tankers? The money you spend on countering cheap drones would be massive, and this administration would likely ask the escorted ships to pay for protection. At that point, they might as well just pay Iran.
The rub is the insurance for the tankers. The providers are looking at the risk and saying “hard pass.” Unless the US govt wants to get in the tanker insurance business they are stuck.
1 reply →
I don't know anything about this but I am a software engineer.
Stop laughing for a minute because I do have a point.
As a software engineer, I typically build something and engineer it so I can iterate quickly and improve it. I know that the first version won't work.
Isn't this a perfect opportunity for Iran to iterate on sinking cargo ships? I'm struggling to believe that a regime that is (allegedly) weeks away from a nuclear bomb wouldn't be able to keep launching missiles at ships until they notice the right type of hole.
And, think of the apprenticeship opportunities.
Iran doesn't want to sink merchant ships. They want to extort money from merchant shipping companies by threatening to sink their ships if they don't pay for 'protection'. All they need is a credible threat, which they already have absent any naval ships willing to stay at point blank range to defend merchant ships.
While there are religious, cultural and political aspects to this, the Iranian govt has primarily become a kleptocracy in recent years. It sustains power through the Revolutionary Guard (aka IRGC) which has grown into what's essentially a state-run, money-making commercial enterprise. It collaborates and colludes with various entities across the Iranian economy which it controls either directly or via bribes and coercion. While reasonable people can debate what the recent attacks on Iran accomplished, they certainly nerfed a large part of the IGRC's income. The new Hormuz extortion scheme isn't just retaliation or vengeance, it's replacing lost income which is urgently needed to prop up the Iranian government.
Yes, Iran has already hit several merchant vessels. Their ability to do that occasionally is not in doubt. It's mostly a question of economics. The ship owners and insurers have to decide whether it's worth the risk to run their cargoes through. This has all happened before with the 1980s "Tanker War" between Iraq and Iran: despite some losses the traffic never completely stopped.
And large merchant ships, especially crude oil tankers, and quite tough to sink. When they take a hit it usually just causes some damage.
Iterating on a rocket design is not like making a tweak to a line of code. It needs production line changes, manufacturing, testing, (repeat X times) where the process takes weeks, months or even years untill desired results can be achieved. And their manudacturing sites have been reduced to rubble, so that slows things down too.
3 replies →
The Iranians (and their Houthi proxies) have made sustained attacks on them and don't seem to have hit anything.
That's because the US has kept the surface combatants far back from the Persian Gulf for the duration of the war.
As far as we know, they have attempted to run the strait twice and had to turn back because they were under sustained attack.
I assume these ships can defend themselves for some period of time, but eventually the munitions run out, and they become sitting ducks. There is a reason the US Navy fled the Persian Gulf on Feb 26 and has not returned since.
> There is a reason the US Navy fled the Persian Gulf on Feb 26 and has not returned since.
Two US Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers transited Hormuz a couple of weeks ago without damage and are still there last I heard. The Iranians were really upset, but couldn't do anything to stop it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2-us-navy-destroyers-transit-st...
2 replies →
> I don't know enough about the current state of naval warfare but I've assumed this is related to the asymmetry that's emerged around protecting capital warships, especially in the scenario of a very narrow strait and a long enemy-controlled coastline.
It's not the billion-dollar warships that transport oil, it's the much more fragile and unarmed tankers.
Even if the US Navy begins full escort duty, it can't remain on-station forever. What are shippers to do afterwards? One drone strike might cause a tanker to have a very bad day, yet it's extremely difficult to so permanently degrade an entire country that they become incapable of launching sporadic attacks.
Ultimately, the status of the Strait must be settled diplomatically, and the US and Iran are each betting that the other side will blink first.
It's not even the strait that's the important geopolitical entity here. It's all the oil pumps and refineries in Saudi Arabia, Qatar or UAE.
The US began to patrol the strait with Destroyers and immediately stopped when the scared Saudis immediately realized that Iran was about to attack Saudi oil rigs.
--------
Iran has too many targets and the only thing that can stop them is the equivalent to an Israeli Iron Dome across the entirety of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE, maybe more.
I think this is not discussed enough. These are huge investments and destroying them requires a significant time to recover. Our key growth play being AI which is a huge energy consumer, impacting the long term supply chain for energy is questionable.
All of this was well known before the war though. The idea that navy is incredibly vulnerable modern anti-ship defenses has been a major consideration in the Taiwan situation for at least a decade (mostly in relation to the ability of the US navy to even operate in the area in a war). More recently, Ukraine has made a great show of sinking navy ships with cheap unmanned surface vehicles
Back in WWII you could sail your navy up a river and expect positive results. In the 21st century, the idea of attacking an enemy-held strait with navy doesn't work
Cheap drones taking out an AWACS is a great example of this. The US has only 16 of these and it will cost $700 million to replace, and was taken out by a drone that probably cost less than your car.
The very definition of asymmetric.
The US military is also just less powerful than it was at its peak at the end of the Cold War as well.
Still the most powerful navy in the world, but spread increasingly thin (turns out "the whole world" is quite a big place).
This is no longer Reagan's (almost) 600 ship navy, and projecting power halfway round the world is no mean feat when your opponent can lob missiles and drones at you from their back garden
suppose one has N independently developed interception systems (from detection till physical interception attempt), each with an intercept success rate of 90%.
a rudimentary calculation then gives the probability of hitting (not sinking) the ship as 0.1^N per launched missile; so it seems that given enough budget to spend on independently developed missile interception systems allows to drive down the penetration success rate arbitrarily.
Multi-billion sounds like $ 10^10; so assuming an attacker can launch say a million missile attempts then the statistical loss would be 0.1^N * 10^10 * 10^6; so the statistical loss can be driven down arbitrarily say to $ 1 by developing ~ 16 independent interception systems.
16 independently developed intercept systems doesn't sound like unobtainium for a vested nuclear power.
furthermore, the development cost of 16 independent intercept systems can be amortized over many more installations than a single ship, it can be amortized over multiple ships, multiple bases, multiple strategic assets across the globe.
You have abstracted things a bit too far.
Unless your interceptor system is unobtainium laser system with unobtainium cooling system, backed-up by unobtainium power source, you are going to run out of interceptor missiles (or even Phalanx bullets) way sooner than 'million missile attempts'.
Quite possibly 100-200 Shaheds + half a dozen proper anti-ship missiles will cause you to turn tail.
> Even if a warship stops the vast majority of them, only one has to get through to sink a multi-billion dollar ship that takes a decade to replace.
Even worse. They don't need to attack _warships_. They can just attack civilian vessels, especially tanker ships, that don't have any defenses.
A hit on a tanker and the subsequent oil spill would be catastrophic.