Iran Plans For Attrition War In Gulf - Exercise Featured Small Boats, Hit-And-Run Attacks

Since 05-09-06

From Undersea Enterprise News Daily, 9 May 2006

By Riad Kahwaji, Defense News, 8 May 06

TEHRAN—A superfast torpedo and other flashy new weapons grabbed the headlines when Iranian leaders staged a very public set of naval exercises in early April. But the small boats that put to sea armed with rockets, machine guns and mines showed how Iran would actually fight if rising tensions over its nuclear program should lead to war in the Arabian Gulf.

Groups of the boats might swarm around U.S. warships, then withdraw into the cover of islands, haze and shipping, analysts and observers say. Suicide bombers might aim to duplicate the 2000 attack that crippled the destroyer USS Cole. Others might position mines and missiles to threaten the oil tankers that carry one-fifth of the world’s daily petroleum traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

“Iranians are preparing for guerrilla warfare at sea,” said Ali-Asghar Kazemi, a retired Iranian Navy admiral who is a political science professor at Tehran University. “Like operations on land, when two unequal opponents face each other, the best way for the weak side is to resort to a war of attrition and guerrilla operations.”

U.S. planners have been laying plans to meet such assaults — especially since a 2002 war game in which swarming boats decimated a U.S. fleet.

Iranian Tactics

Such small boats will likely form the core striking force if the international showdown over Iran’s uranium-enrichment program leads to open war in the Gulf.

Iran’s larger vessels — three old British Vosper Mk-5 frigates, two aging U.S.-built PF-103 corvettes, even its three Kilo-class diesel submarines — would likely stay home, Kazemi said.

Instead, Iran could sortie nearly 400 small, high-speed craft armed with rocket launchers, torpedoes and mines. Army Gen. John Abizaid, who leads U.S. Central Command, told lawmakers in March that Iran also has been spreading them out along its 2,000-mile coastline by constructing more naval bases. Iran has a few dozen C-802 anti-ship missiles, which it purchased from China in the early 1990s.

The subsonic, radar-guided C-802 skims the sea’s surface to strike targets up to 140 kilometers away.

“These small Iranian craft can simply launch quick hit-and-run assaults on oil tankers, and many of the small craft can outrun the heavier destroyers and frigates,” said Mustapha Al-Ani, director of security studies at the Gulf Research Center here.

Boats and midget submarines loaded with high explosives also could ram giant oil tankers or aircraft carriers in suicide attacks, said Qassem Jaafar, a defense analyst based in Doha, Qatar.

Iranian forces also might target Arab states’ coastal installations, such as oil refineries, ports and desalination plants with the C-802 and other missiles, said Sami Al-Faraj, president of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies. Iranian officials have hinted that, in a war, they might strike Gulf tankers or oil installations in an attempt to push up oil prices and punish Western economies.

And Arab Gulf states expect terrorist attacks if war breaks out between the United States and Iran.

“Regional intelligence agencies have been monitoring all suspicious Iranian activities, and the [Kuwaiti] Coast Guard will play a lead role in preventing Iranian agents from entering the Gulf states,” Al-Faraj said.

Kazemi said the Iranian military command turned to a guerrilla strategy after U.S. and Iranian naval forces clashed in the 1980s. After a naval mine nearly sank a U.S. guided missile frigate in April 1988, American forces sent two Iranian warships and at least three armed boats to the bottom in the daylong battle called Operation Praying Mantis.

The lesson was that “in a purely classical naval engagement, the Iranian Navy would not be able to sustain combat capability and will soon be out of effective operation,” the retired admiral said.

Kazemi assessed April’s small-boat maneuvers in this way:

“In an enclosed, narrow and rather shallow region such as the Persian Gulf, this tactic can be very decisive against large units and can deny the enemy from effective deployment, sea lines of communication and power projection.” Some say the Iranian naval threat could be blunted by quick U.S. action.

“Of course, the impact on the world economy would be big if Iranian naval boats succeed in hitting some tankers or oil installations,” Jaafar said. “But this economic impact would be temporary and the world market would recover quickly as soon as U.S. forces obliterate the Iranian Navy and Air Force and establish full control over the Gulf.”

U.S. Tactics

The U.S. Navy has been thinking about the problem of small craft at least as long as Iran has. U.S. attacks on Iran’s naval command-andcontrol infrastructure may keep most swarms from ever finding their targets.

Surveillance is key: If the raiders can be tracked as they swarm from their bases, they can be sunk with Rockeye cluster bombs and other munitions.

Boats that get close to a U.S. warship would likely be engaged with the few large caliber machine guns — or, by those ships lucky enough to carry the improved 1B version of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System — by six shell-spitting Gatling barrels guided by a radar tuned to pick small craft out of the ocean’s radar “grass.”

“A major ship could find itself surrounded by large numbers of these things and wouldn’t be able to pick them off before they’d get a hit,” New York-based naval analyst Norman Friedman said. “And in radar, they tend to blend in the traffic. But I’m somewhat skeptical this would work.”

Friedman said it would be difficult for the boats, which carry no sophisticated sensors, to find their targets.

Yet, he said, “They become more impressive when you talk them in a suicide role. The Iranians demonstrated suicide tactics during the Iran-Iraq war, and [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is constantly bringing up that example inside Iran.”

In the 2002 Joint Forces Command war game Millennium Challenge, anti-U.S. forces used swarms of small boats and aircraft to rip into a U.S. invasion fleet, sending much of it to the bottom of a shallow sea.

Iranian Statements

As rumors swirl in Washington about U.S. military contingency plans to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, Jaafar said Iranian ballistic missile launchers and other military and defenseindustry infrastructure would be high on the target list if U.S. forces struck pre-emptively at the Iranian nuclear program.

But the Iranian grand strategy has been to attempt to make all options appear futile to get the international community to accept a nuclearcapable Iran.

Iran “already has the nuclear know-how, and thus this process cannot be stopped, even by war,” said Ali Larijani, secretary-general of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council. “Iran is a vast country and they [Americans] cannot bomb everything, and if they attack, we would proceed in our nuclear activities in a clandestine manner.”

The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, said at the end of the April exercises, “You [the United States] can start a war, but it won’t be you who finishes it.”

Christopher P. Cavas contributed to this report from Washington.