Comments on: Iran Sends Small Boats, Big Message

By: persian golf

persian golf — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:39:48 +0000

not golf

persian golf.do you understand?

please repeat again..persian golf

thank you Mr liar

By: persian golf

persian golf — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:33:20 +0000

not golf

persian golf.do you understand?

please repeat again..persian golf

thank you Mr liar

By: roland

roland — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:21:19 +0000

The boats on the picture looks like the MacV boat armed with 2 avenger missile lauchers.

By: roland

roland — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:21:17 +0000

Iran have missile boats. We (USA)and allies needed to prepare and have a better designed long range missile boats for future unforseen conflict with them.

By: Larry

Larry — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:58:07 +0000

You boys will pardon my ignorance, but my knowledge of Naval terminology is sadly antiquated by a period of 45 years, and although a few of those acronyms were familiar to me, most were not. For the sake of us old salts I wish you'd just spell them out so we can understand what you're talking about. For example, "two FFG's, an Austin class LPD" (they're some kind of missle equipped tin can, I would guess) Army SOF's, and so forth. I once read a letter to the editor from a guy that works in the oil & gas field and he used so many terms that only another oil field worker would know that the whole thing was just so much Greek to everybody else.

By: tmowry

tmowry — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:59:49 +0000

That is the biggest point that I am trying to make. You said it much more succintly. Not impossilbe but USN will have thier hands full.

By: tmowry

tmowry — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:43:20 +0000

You’re right they were called sea bats and they were not supposed to exsist..I spent many a night working as an air controller doing bat patrols. I also went to visit the SOF folks on the Wim Brown VII to as for the Bats we only had three and we had a lot of gulf to cover. Our primary mission was near the ARAMCO oil rigs north of Bahrain. As for the helo off the Barge, I believe that there were two but only one flew per mission. We were the second ship to have the Sea Bats stationed on board. The first I believe was the Elrod. We went there to get briefing materials and for an overview of their operations when we INCHOPed to the gulf. Later in March the OH 58’s were deployed. They were called AHIPS ( advanced helicopter something something). Small and underpowered and overloaded they got blown around like a kite in the wind operating in a Maritime Environment.

By: tmowry

tmowry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:33:09 +0000

I think the paragraph in the report regarding their tactics in the 80’s is misleading. The only “airpower” in the gulf at the time were two SH60’s on the FFG’s in the gulf, CH 53’s that were sweeping for mines, and some Sea Cobras attached to the Amphib that was supporting the mine sweeping ops. The carriers were stationed in the Gulf of Oman and they were not always near enough to launch strikes. Carriers were not permitted to transit the Straits of Hormuz at that time. So there was no standing CAP or SUCAP in the Gulf.

By: CBD

CBD — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:55:10 +0000

Zach. Have them: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_print.asp?cid=2... Practice with them: http://www.air-attack.com/news/article/2195/Air-F... http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=1... But countering them is trickier... The LCS is meant to fill in for MCM roles, but is late. We have some UUVs and helicopter-based systems (RAMICS) meant as part of the LCS MCM package, but those have all come along slowly (RAMICS IOC was '07, then '12, now '16...at least partly because of limited devoted resources). We have 10 active and 14 reserve Avenger-class MCM boats built in the late 80s to mid 90s. We did have 12 Osprey-class MHC boats built in the early-to-late 90s, but they were all decommissioned in '06-'07 (since RAMICS was right around the corner, eliminating the need for shallow-water mine-hunting ships, oops) and 10 were transferred to friendly nations.

By: Camp

Camp — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:47:01 +0000

tmowry, Actually, Army SOF's operated 'little birds' & OH-58 from platforms/barges in the gulf. They were tasked to hunt down small boats & provided fire support. From my understanding they were rather successful. http://www.warboats.org/images/jpg/LooseImages/ir... http://www.warboats.org/images/jpg/GrayJuly09/ahi... http://www.warboats.org/persiangulf.htm "The Marine Corps wanted the helicopter mission, but their craft were too large and their pilots lacked extensive night flying training. At Crowe’s insistence, and over the objections of the Department of the Army, Task Force 160 from Fort Campbell was tasked to provide helicopters and night surveillance capability for the barges. Its A–6 (attack) and M–6 (command and control) helicopters were designed to operate exclusively at night, being outfitted with forward-looking infrared (FLIR) and night vision goggles." http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/0629.pd...

By: EmperorTrajan

EmperorTrajan — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:23:13 +0000

Iraq wasn’t much of a balancer; it took billions of dollars in western and Soviet HW plus East German, French and Russian “advisors” flying Iraqi aircraft and operating Iraqi artillery and ballistic missiles to halt the Iranians and launch the final counter offensive of the war that brought the Iranians to the negotiating table.

A country of 25 million with limited sea access, porous borders and a boiling ethnic soup of people is not really a good foil to use against a country of 70 million people with 3 times the land area.

Collectively, the Arab world (the gulf states in particular) have more than enough military capability to defeat Iran. They just need the will (to ally with Israel).

By: EmperorTrajan

EmperorTrajan — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:14:50 +0000

I should clarify: I meant that the Iraqis used their Mi-24s against Iranian fast attack craft operating in the gulf littoral (Shatt-Al-Arab). I agree that finding these little buggers is difficult for RF based techniques which I way I explicitly mentioned mostly Laser/EO/IR-guided weaponry (Hellfire and Javelin) or a multi-modal RF guided missile like ESSM (which can be employed against surface targets).

Assuming a permissive air environment, I don’t see why standing Apache, Hind or Seahawk patrols couldn’t defeat the Iranian fast attack craft menace.

By: Greg Grant

Greg Grant — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:32:37 +0000

tmowry,

I second your plug for Brad Peniston’s excellent book “No Higher Honor.” He is a former editor of mine and his account of the Samuel B Roberts is chock full of great detail.

Greg

By: tmowry

tmowry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:33:22 +0000

The force that was in the gulf consisted of one aging cruiser, the Wainwright was with us, an Adams class DDG, two FFGs, Austin Class LPD, a few mine sweepers, a small boat detachment. I did not forget the Coronado; she was homeported in Bahrain and carried the ComMidEast Force flag. All expendable. High value units such as Aegis Cruisers and more modern amphibs were only allowed in after the primary naval threat had been nuetralized with Operation Preying Mantis. As for the other navy’s in the Region; the Saudis only operated during the day and anchored at night, at times there was French Corvette, and also a British Frigate. The Soviets deployed a Natya class mine sweeper to act as an escort for their vessals. Again I am going to point everyone to No Higher Honor. The book does and excellant job of describing the US Navy’s operations in the region at this time.

By: tmowry

tmowry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:07:52 +0000

I don’t know about the Iraqis perfecting the tactics. I was a tactical air controller with the navy at the time. We were developing tactics working with folks from Fort Campbell in the late 80’s. We watched the tanker war in the gulf first hand, saw lots of Iraqi F 1s and even the occassional Iraqi Badger (yes they did have a Russian Badger) can’t say that I saw much maritime helo work by the Iraqis. Finding the little buggers is part of the problem. At the time the primary threat was Boghammers. Very similiar to what the Somali Pirates are doing now. Their current fleet is far more sophisticated and will be far more problematic. Add to this the fact that the Persian Gulf is an electronic hole due to strange propagation effects from the atmospherics. We used to have HF transmissions that would get cut off between 20 and 30 miles and UHF transmissions that could travel the whole length of the gulf. Radar signals are equally finicky and at times the small boats would be right on top of you before you would see them. Not saying that your theory is wrong, just don’t under estimate the difficulty of the task.

By: Zach

Zach — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:11:15 +0000

““Its inventory includes as many as 1,000 Chinese EM11 influence mines and the EM52 rocket-propelled mine. In addition to advanced mines from China, Iran bought 1,800 mines from Russia in 2000. The antique World War I-era contact mines used in the 1980s by Iran are a thing of the past,” he says. ”

I know its NEVER talked about… but does the US still have mines? I know we don’t use them anymore, but does the navy still train to deploy them? Or does the navy just do counter mine operations now?

By: EmperorTrajan

EmperorTrajan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:58:31 +0000

A bunch of ESSM armed picket ships combined with Javelin/Hellfire ATGM armed helicopter gunships will make sort work of these fast attack craft. The Iraqis perfected the use of helicopter gunships against Iranian fast attack craft during the Iran-Iraq war and that was before the heavy use of PGMs.

By: robert

robert — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:29:27 +0000

Without Iraq as the balance of power over there no one to stop Iran thanks Bush

By: tmowry

tmowry — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:00:52 +0000

Shameless Plug alert. Read No Higher Honor by Brad Peniston. It is the story of my ship the Samuel B Roberts. We were in the middle of this mess the last time. Never mind the nuclear weapons the mines that they have will be much more effective.

By: Camp

Camp — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:03:57 +0000

One thing that comes to mind when coupling the Straits of Hormuz with an Iranian "anti-access" policy. To what ends will this game change, if the Iranians can park one or two nuclear weapons in the vicinity? The Strauss Center has a couple of pages on the Straits of Hormuz (Aug. 08). It's worth a glance. "Mines" http://hormuz.robertstrausscenter.org/mines "Small Boats" http://hormuz.robertstrausscenter.org/boats "Tactically, Iran commonly tried "mass swarming tactics" to attack using large numbers of small boats simultaneously. The largest of these attacks allegedly involved over forty individual boats.[xxii] These "mass swarm" attacks proved extremely vulnerable to U.S. air power during the Tanker War. This susceptibility may be one of the major factors causing the IRGC to retreat from a planned attack on Kuwaiti oil infrastructure in October 1987 in the face of a Saudi/U.S. show of air and sea strength.[xxiii] Today, in addition to its conventional fleet of warships and larger patrol boats, the IRGC operates a vast fleet of small boats, estimated at more than 1000 boats in the 2004 Office of Naval Intelligence World Maritime Challenges report.[xxiv] Learning from past shortcomings of mass swarming tactics, Iran officially stated a new doctrine of "asymmetric" use of small boats. Instead of attacking all at once from the same direction, new Iranian strategy calls for dispersed swarming of 20-plus boats originating from a number of different directions." "Persian Gulf Conflict" - 1980's http://www.warboats.org/persiangulf.htm "Operation Earnest Will - 1988" http://www.warboats.org/SBU13.htm#oew