Donald Trump hit by Iran's tanker war

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has turned the tables on President Trump’s “fire and fury” campaign. The Strait of Hormuz through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil passes, is blocked. Tankers and cargo vessels are on fire. The navy section of the IRGC has struck back with its most effective revenge card. Now the third tanker war in four decades has scuppered Trump’s hopes of declaring victory against Iran in the near future. Despite the massive destruction caused by US and Israeli bombers since the war began on Saturday, February 28, the IRGC still has the capacity and the skills to drag the whole of the Middle East into the conflict. Not so much with its short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles, not even by its long-range drones, although all have caused fear and damage across the region. But by its combat-proven ability to send across the Gulf waterway explosives-laden drone boats, fast attack craft armed with missiles and sea-skimming cruise missiles from concealed coastal launchers. It’s the IRGC navy’s asymmetric warfare versus the full panoply of America’s mighty armada of aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers and Tomahawk-armed submarines. “Iran learned this lesson in the 1980s during the first tanker war, that if you have a conventional navy it’s vulnerable if you come up against the US Navy, so they went asymmetric and relied on cheap, small, in-shore craft that could cause a lot of damage. They didn’t require naval facilities and could just pop out, carry out an attack and go back into hiding,” said retired Vice Admiral Duncan Potts, much of whose Royal Navy career was spent in the Gulf facing daily threats from the IRGC. During the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, Iraq tried to disrupt Iran’s oil exports, and Tehran retaliated by attacking ships in the Gulf associated with Baghdad’s trading partners. Iraq responded with its own tanker war. More than 400 ships were attacked, 239 of them oil tankers. Many countries were forced to send warships to guard the shipping route, including the US, the UK (operating the Royal Navy’s Armilla Patrol), the then Soviet Union and France. Potts who is president of the Royal Naval Association (PLEASE LEAVE THIS IN), said Admiral Brad Cooper, the American in command of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, was well versed in IRGC tactics because he used to be commander of the US Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain. “I can’t believe the US won’t be directing their efforts on this IRGC capability, it’s a different approach to warfare,” Potts said. Potts first served in the Gulf when he was a 21-year-old sub-lieutenant in 1982 but went on to command HMS Southampton, a Type 42 destroyer, in the same region and became commander of Combined Task Force 158, an international naval group providing security in the northern Gulf in 2008 “I’ve always been up against the IRGC,” he said. A former senior Pentagon official said: “It’s hard to say at this point whether the US Navy is ahead of the threat or not. One thing for sure, this is not like the tanker war in the 1980s. The age of the drones [air and sea] has enabled Iran to fight precision warfare on the cheap. Mines which bedevilled us in the first Gulf War ]1991, will enable the Iranians to pose multiple problems for tanker traffic. So far in Operation Epic Fury, the focus has been on effecting-a strategic defeat on the Tehran regime– a shock and awe style of warfighting which has achieved impressive results, not least the knocking out of a large proportion of Iran’s ballistic-missile capability and destruction of command-and-control sites. Trump has also repeatedly referred to the obliteration of the Iranian navy - about 60 naval vessels so far, according to Admiral Cooper. But the Iranian navy wasn’t the real threat. “What the Iranians are doing now is entirely predictable, the IRGC is using small boat drones, jet skis in some cases, and mines to achieve a disproportionate impact. You don’t need a specialised warship to lay mines, a rowing boat can do it, depending on the mine,” said Kevin Rowlands who served with the Royal Navy’s Armilla Patrol in the Gulf in the 1990s. Mines are now being dropped in the water in the Strait of Hormuz by IRGC small boats, the US has confirmed. The disproportionate impact of the asymmetric warfare is clear to see. Before the launch of Operation Epic Fury, an average of about 153 commercial vessels transited through the Strait of Hormuz every day. Since March 1, the strait has effectively been closed to all traffic. Rowlands, a specialist at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “The US navy with its aircraft carriers would probably prefer to engage with a peer adversary, like China, out in the open with long-range weapons and sensors, carrier against carrier. But what they have against Iran is more like counter-insurgency.” One way to combat the IRGC navy’s capabilities would be to launch an amphibious raid on the in-shore drones and missile launchers, he said. “But I don’t think there’s any intention of doing that, with boots on the ground,” he said. So, If the Iranians have learned lessons from the previous tanker wars – the second one was in 2019 during heightened tensions following the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran – then the US, too, will have to adapt to counter the tricky warfare of the IRGC navy. If the US is intent on continuing the war, Rowlands said, there might come a time when commercial ships will need protecting. “But I don’t envisage a convoy of ships with warships alongside. It would be more about information-sharing and perhaps overhead surveillance aircraft or drones to warn tankers of threats,” he said. Ultimately, however, Admiral Cooper will have to do something to eliminate the asymmetric threat to the Gulf waterway. PLEASE BUY MY NEW SPY THRILLER, AGENT REDRUTH. BUY FROM AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS OR WATERSTSONES. ends