Swarms: Land, Sea & Air
We've entered a brave new world.
The last U.S. Navy ship losses happened when I was in diapers. The Scorpion’s sinking may have been related to interactions with a Soviet sub. The Pueblo was taken by storm and remains a North Korean war prize.
That’s it, fifty six years without losing a major hull. There were some exchanges during Vietnam but our only losses were patrol boats in riverine warfare, which are akin to transport aircraft losses in terms of severity. But we’ve had a few close calls, three of which should be mentioned.
USS Stark took two missile strikes in the Persian Gulf (1988)
USS Cole took a suicide boat strike in the Gulf of Aden (2000)
Former HSV-2 Swift took a C-802 Noor strike in the Red Sea (2016)
Noticing a trend here? CBS Evening News has.
Two generations of relative quiet and safety are ending. We saw Ukraine stop the second largest military in the world with a mix of shoulder fired weapons and drones. The addition of a handful of HIMARS redrew the battlefield.
Now take that history of where trouble has been happening and combine it with the new doctrines Ukraine is creating. Not sure how it’s going to look? No problem, you’re covered, because the Iranians have been building for this for the last twenty years.
They build numerous small systems, like the Bavar-2. This is an absolute genius move in my view - these things look like a typical speed boat from a radar perspective, they can lurk among other boats, or they can pop up and run at twice the speed of any navy ship, but as ground effects machines rather than flying boats, they naturally hug the surface. And they’re dramatically easier to learn to operate than becoming a flying boat pilot.
U.S. destroyer have air defense capabilities and our cruisers are air war specialists, built to protect carrier and expeditionary strike groups. They’re all around 10,000 tons displacement. Japan has some capabilities like ours, as does the United Kingdom. Nobody else really tries.
Now have a look at Iran’s take on this. A sixteen ton speed boat with a radar meant for a ship a hundred times its size, built to deliver SAMs. The IRGC can produce fifty point threats with the same manpower we need for one ship. They’re a bit too large to hide in a 2TEU container, but U.S. aircraft operating in the Persian Gulf will never be able to turn their backs on small boats, for fear it’s one of these.
What counts as a large ship for the Iranians are these diminutive stealth corvettes - the 600 ton Shahid Soleimani class.
A full throttle confrontation between Iran and the United States in the Persian Gulf will go our way for one simple reason - all of their eggs are in a single basket called Kharg island. A single 5th Fleet destroyer could end their oil exports without even untying from the pier in Bahrain.
But doing so would be an attack on everyone who depends on oil tankers freely coming and going via the Strait of Hormuz. This would hit China hard … but Japan and Korea get hit as well. And then that narrow bit of strait would be just like the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea - a danger zone for any vessel attempting to pass.
We tried to use Cold War era thinking against al Qaeda and we got our butts kicked. We’re seeing Cold War era doctrine and equipment turned into piles of scorched of scrap all over Ukraine. The fact that we have eight times as many aircraft carriers as the rest of the world combined only gets us just so far against an opponent that is willing to fight.
Caveat Prognosticator
I’ve been digging through Peter Zeihan’s work and this has been a MAJOR redrawing of my world view. I was already a systems thinker when it came to agriculture and energy but there are population dynamics I had never factored into the equation.
We’ve had eighty years of Pax Americana which is now drawing to a close.
And the hard part in all of this has been getting my head around the U.S. stepping back from being the global guarantor of the free flow of oil … and North America being OK after this, albeit with a rough transition. China’s manufacturing role can shift to Mexico - they have the young people willing to work that China lacks.
The Persian Gulf following the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea into shooting gallery mode is going to be really uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons, but it may be both inevitable AND not impossible for us.
Feels funny to type that, as a child of the late Cold War years, but here we are.
A post publication addendum - I just noticed this from Peter Zeihan