Iranian Admiral Habibollah Sayyari says it would be "very easy" for his navy to shut down the Strait of Hormuz
Since
it doesn’t have nuclear weapons yet, Iran is playing the lone trump card in its
hand: threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz through which Persian Gulf
oil flows to fuel much of the world’s economy. Iranian navy chief Admiral
Habibollah Sayyari told state television Wednesday that it would be “very easy”
for his forces to shut down the chokepoint. “Iran has comprehensive control
over the strategic waterway,” he said as his vessels continued a 10-day
exercise near the strait.
But
just how good a trump card is it?
“Iran
has constructed a navy with considerable asymmetric and other capabilities
designed specifically to be used in an integrated way to conduct area denial
operations in the Persian Gulf and SoH, and they routinely exercise these
capabilities and issue statements of intent to use them,” Jonathan Schroden
writes in a recent report for the Pentagon-funded Center for Naval Analyses. “This
combination of capabilities and expressed intent does present a credible threat
to international shipping in the Strait.”
Not
so fast, other experts maintain. “We believe that we would be able to maintain
the strait,” Marine General James Cartwright, then-vice chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, told Congress last year. “But it would be a question of time
and impact and the implications from a global standpoint on the flow of energy,
et cetera, [that] would have ramifications probably beyond the military actions
that would go on.”
International
maritime law guarantees unimpeded transit through straits, and any deliberate
military disruption is an act of war. “Anyone who threatens to disrupt freedom
of navigation in an international strait is clearly outside the community of
nations,” the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet said from its headquarters in Bahrain. “Any
disruption will not be tolerated.”
Of
course, brandishing a threat and carrying it out are two different things. “By
presuming that Iran can easily close the strait, Western diplomats concede
leverage, and the current U.S. habit of reacting immediately and aggressively
to Iranian provocations risks unnecessary escalation,” Eugene Gholz, a
professor at the University of Texas, wrote in Foreign Policy in 2009. “Iran
would find it so difficult, if not impossible, to close the strait that the
world can afford to relax from its current hair-trigger alert.”
Most
U.S. military thinkers, speaking privately, seem to agree. There are two linked
issues at play here: military and monetary. While it might be challenging for
the Iranian navy to shut down commerce flowing through the strait, Iranian
moves to carry out that threat could have much the same effect. Oil companies,
and the shippers that transport their product by water, are conservative
business types, not given to putting their costly tankers and crews in harm’s
way. But they’d get over it pretty quickly, and commerce would resume, with
higher insurance rates.
One
point worth noting: analyses of possible Iranian military action to plug the
strait generally note that Iran gets about half of its national budget from oil
exports that transit the strait. But if the next round of sanctions keeps
Iranian oil off the world market, that brake on Iranian military action will be
gone.
Iran
has been practicing such saber-rattling for decades, and it always sends a
nervous twitch through the world oil markets, spiking prices upward. It has
done so this week, and oil’s per-barrel price has flirted with the $100 mark.
That’s a drag on the world economic powers seeking to punish Iran for its
nuclear-development efforts, and Tehran plainly views it as a net-positive for
itself. That’s especially true in the year leading up to a U.S. presidential
election, where the incumbent is seeking a second term.
About
a fifth of the world’s oil flows through the strait, which is only 34 miles
wide at its narrowest point. But the navigable part of the strait is 20 miles
across, although shipping is supposed to use a pair of two-mile wide channels,
one inbound and the other outbound. Iran borders the strait to the north and
east, and it has a major naval base – and its key submarine base – close by.
“While
closing the Strait may be possible for Iran for a short period of time, the
U.S. military would prevail in a conflict with Iran in order to re-open the
Strait at a great cost to the Iranian armed forces,” Brenna Schnars wrote in a
2010 study at the Naval Postgraduate School. “With international mistrust
concerning the Iranian nuclear program already at the height of world concerns,
an Iranian closure of the Strait would only enrage the majority of the
international community, as their economies would severely suffer without its
oil imports from the Persian Gulf.”
U.S.
Navy Commander Rodney Mills examined the military implications of an Iranian
move to shut the strait in a 2008 study at the Naval War College. His bottom
line:
There
is consensus among the analysts that the U.S. military would ultimately prevail
over Iranian forces if Iran sought to close the strait. The various scenarios
and assumptions used in the analyses produce a range of potential timelines for
this action, from the optimistic assessment that the straits would be open in a
few days to the more pessimistic assessment that it would take five weeks to
three months to restore the full flow of maritime traffic.
But
fighting an Iranian effort to close the strait may not be easy. Iran in recent
years has acquired “thousands of sea mines, wake homing torpedoes, hundreds of
advanced cruise missiles and possibly more than one thousand small Fast Attack
Craft and Fast Inshore Attack Craft,” U.S. Navy Commander Daniel Dolan wrote in
a report last year at the Naval War College. “…The majority of these A2/AD
[anti-access, area-denial] forces are concentrated astride the vital Strait of
Hormuz…” He urged the U.S. and its allies to fight any Iranian effort to shut
the strait from the relative safely of the Arabian Sea, that broad body of water
between the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. “It will allow the [allied
commander] to concentrate fires on attriting the enemy forces,” he said, “while
denying the enemy an equal opportunity to return fires.”
History
offers some guidance. In the 1980s, the “tanker wars” between Iran and Iraq in
the Persian Gulf – which led to 544 attacks and 400 civilians killed over eight
years – the oil flow dropped by 25% before returning to normal levels.
Insurances rates also would rise – perhaps from a penny to $6 a barrel, Mills
estimates – a steep hike in insurance premiums, but not that much when tacked
on to a $100 barrel of oil. “Despite the increased risk,” Mills notes, “history
shows us that insurance will remain available at a reasonable rate for the
value of the cargo shipped.”
Iran
has scant chance of covertly mining the strait, U.S. military officers say.
Small boats or anti-ship missiles would make more military sense. But Iran’s
trio of Russian-built Kilo-class submarines, as well as a dozen smaller subs,
would be vulnerable to U.S. anti-submarine warfare. “The (U.S.) Navy,” Mills
wrote, “would be eager to permanently eliminate the Iranian submarine threat in
a naval conflict.”
And
attacks Iran launched against tankers aren’t guaranteed to work. “Most tankers
today are of newer, double-hulled designs; coupled with internal
compartmentalization, this tends to limit damage from an explosion,” Mills’
study said. “There are relatively few areas of vital machinery that could
disable the vessel if damaged, and much of the vital machinery is underwater.”
But what about all that oil? “The crude oil they carry tends to absorb and
dissipate the shock caused by an explosion, reducing the effectiveness of the
warhead,” Mills wrote. “And the crude oil is not very flammable, reducing the
chance of fire or secondary explosion.”
All
this is not to say any battle over the strait would be a cakewalk, as some U.S.
officials erroneously predicted the Iraq war would be. If war were to break
out, Iran would throw everything it has into the fight. “It’s clear that the
Iranians have taken an approach in which they are going to attempt to use small
boats, swarms, cruise missiles, mines, perhaps suicide boats, small
submarines,” Vice Admiral Mark Fox, the top U.S. commander in the region, said
earlier this year. “We watch them very carefully and understand where they are,
what they’re doing.”
Fox’s
5th Fleet, which patrols the region, recommends its officers read Immortal: A
Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces, by CIA analyst Steven R. Ward.
“Iran’s soldiers, from the famed `Immortals’ of ancient Persia to today’s
Revolutionary Guard, have demonstrated through the centuries that they should
not be underestimated,” a summary of the book on the fleet’s web site says.
“The Iranians’ ability to impose high costs on their enemies by exploiting
Iran’s imposing geography bear careful consideration today by potential
opponents.”
Fox
acknowledges that “imposing geography” cited by Ward as the admiral discussed
how the Iranians would likely fight. “They have a long littoral there — it’s
1,300 nautical miles,” Fox said. “They’ve got a lot of places where they have
an ability to set up, they have coves for small boats and cruise missiles that
can potentially move around.” All this would complicate any conflict.
But
Mills sees all the Iranian rhetoric and war gaming as little more than Persian
saber rattling. “Iran gains more from the existence of their threat,” he
concludes, “than they would by actually carrying it out.”
-This commentary was published in
Time magazine’s blog on 28/12/2011
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