What's Going On With Shipping? is an excellent YouTube channel. In today's installment, Sal reviews the latest bad news from the Straits of Hormuz.
What hits me here is that the US Navy is too small for the job and the Littoral Combat Ships simply aren't fit for purpose. They have almost no firepower and are essentially bullet sponges. They were originally intended for just this kind of area, but when faced with operational realities, they've got to be kept out of the line of fire.
Second, the US is learning the lessons from the recent revolution in warfare - inexpensive drones - the hard way. The Iranian-built Shahed 136 is a long-range kamikaze drone with a 100# warhead. I'm pretty sure it's GPS-guided. It's great for attacking immobile, thin-skinned targets like energy infrastructure or docked ships. At 100 MPH, it would take forever for it to get to its target, but you need something in the air to shoot it down.
We're not privy to the kill rates for the Allies or the munitions drawdown for the Iranians, so I'm still sanguine about the end result. It's not even been 2 weeks yet. It would be great to have a magic wand to wave and make it all go away, but those are in short supply.
Lastly, some of the attacks on shipping have been done by Unmanned Surface Vehicles. Think speedboats with explosives on the bow, guided by radio from a nearby command boat. You have to get real close to the enemy to use those and the command boat is a sitting duck. It's a kamikaze mission of its own. It's the fact that the Iranians have had any success at all with these that makes the small size of the US Navy apparent. As Sal says in the video below, during Desert Storm, we didn't have these problems because our Navy was twice the size it is today and none of the hulls were those useless LCSs.
Anyway, here's the video.
3 comments:
"I'm still sanguine about the end result."
That kind of depends on what you expect as the end result. Where do you think this is ultimately heading?
If the goal was to just smack around the Iranian government and tell them, "Now behave, or we will smack you around again!", then the objective has likely already been achieved.
If the goal is to replace their old leadership with some that are more well-disposed to us, well, that's another can of fish. So far we've replaced one absolute theocratic despot with another, but the new one has the added bonus that we not only assassinated his father, but also apparently killed his wife and children. Now, if I were in his position, this would not incline me towards abject surrender and voluntary subjugation. It would be more likely to inspire me to devote everything I have and the remainder of my life to exacting a terrible vengeance on the killers of my family. Is that really where we wanted to end up?
And if the goal is to actually invade any significant part of Iran, and engage in ground combat with over 90 million people who have been told for their entire lives that the US and Israel are devils incarnate and must be destroyed, I don't see that working out well at all for anybody.
I can't see our ground troops getting involved. As for a popular rebellion replacing the mullahs, that's where I'd put my money. It's been less than 2 weeks. Let's see how this plays out.
Here's an interesting tidbit from X. I wasn't aware of the latest minesweeping mission packages on the LCSs. My bad.
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Everything you said about the current state of the Navy's mine countermeasures capability is wrong. Not a little wrong. Completely, embarrassingly, dangerously wrong....
"The four ships we had dedicated to doing this we just decommissioned." The Avengers in Bahrain... Devastator, Dextrous, Gladiator, Sentry. Wooden-hulled ships from the 1980s. Ships that were pushing 40 years old. You know what replaced them? Three Independence-class Littoral Combat Ships... Canberra, Santa Barbara, and Tulsa… all three already deployed to U.S. 5th Fleet, all three operating in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Gulf right now, today, as you wrote this little rant. Not in San Diego. Not in drydock. In theater. Carrying the most advanced mine countermeasures mission package the Navy has ever fielded.
USS Canberra arrived in Bahrain in May 2025 as the first LCS with a full MCM mission package. USS Santa Barbara is in the Arabian Gulf conducting mine countermeasures operations with unmanned surface vehicles… and, by the way, just made naval history by executing the first-ever at-sea launch of a LUCAS one-way attack drone from a littoral combat ship under Task Force 59. USS Tulsa is right there alongside them. Three ships. In the Gulf. Doing the mission. While you say the Navy "is absolutely not ready for this."
These are fundamentally different platforms. Autonomous mine-hunting sonar… the AN/AQS-20C… towed by unmanned surface vehicles so sailors stay outside the minefield. Airborne laser mine detection systems on MH-60 helicopters. Unmanned influence sweep systems for acoustic and magnetic minesweeping. The old Avengers sent sailors INTO the minefield on wooden boats. The new systems keep them OUT of the minefield using robots... something you call a "downgrade"
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