Райан Доусон (репост Animated Military): «Почему ВМС США не могут остановить иранские мини-субмарины»

Why the US Navy Cannot Stop Iran's Mini Submarines

Источник: https://www.ryandawson.org/p/why-the-us-navy-cannot-stop-irans

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At 4.11 local time, in a shallow inlet on the southern coast of Iran, a steel hull about 95 feet long sat just below the surface of the Persian Gulf, about the length of a school bus, crew of seven. The diesel engine was already shut down. The batteries were running quiet. The conning tower was 80 feet underwater, and the boat had been there since the watch changed at three. 14 nautical miles to the north, a United States Navy destroyer was steaming on patrol. Sonar working. Radar working. The crew on the bridge could see the lights of Bandar Abbas glowing faintly to the south. They could not see the submarine. They could not hear it. Iran says it has deployed 16 of these boats this month. 16. Each one carries two torpedoes or two anti-ship missiles. Each one cost less than a single F-35. And the United States Navy, which spent decades training to hunt Russian submarines in the deep Atlantic, cannot reliably find them in 21 miles of shallow water. This video explains how that happens. By the end of this video, you will fully understand three things.

First, why a submarine that costs as much as a luxury house in Connecticut can hold a $2 billion American destroyer at bay. Second, why the Pentagon's anti-submarine playbook was written for the wrong ocean. And third, why a Navy that hunts Russian boomers in the Atlantic cannot reliably find school bus-sized boats in a straight 21 miles wide. This is animated military. We do not chase the headlines. We map the doctrine behind them. Let us start with what one of these boats actually is. Because the picture in your head is probably wrong. The Ghadir class. That is what Iran calls it. The word means promise. The boats were built by the Marine Industries Organization, an arm of Iran's defense ministry, and they entered service in 2007. The class is what the United States Navy calls a midget submarine. A midget submarine is exactly what it sounds like. Small. About 29 meters long, which is roughly the length of a school bus. Two and three quarter meters wide, which is narrower than a parking space. 117 tons on the surface. 125 tons submerged. Compare that to an Arleigh Burke destroyer. 505 feet long. Crew of 300. Displacement over 9,000 tons. The destroyer is roughly 70 times heavier than the Ghadir. And the destroyer is the thing that is supposed to find and kill the Ghadir. The Ghadir runs on a diesel-electric propulsion system. We will explain what that means in a moment. It carries a crew of seven. Two torpedo tubes, each 533 millimeters wide, which is the standard heavyweight torpedo size that almost every navy in the world uses. From those tubes, the Ghadir can fire two Iranian-built weapons. The Valfajr, which is a heavyweight torpedo designed to break a ship in half from below. And the Hout, which is a super-cavitating torpedo, meaning it travels inside a bubble of gas at speeds approaching 200 miles an hour. 200 miles an hour. Underwater, the Hout is based on a Soviet design from the early 1970s called the Shkval. Iran built it. Iran uses it. The Ghadir can also fire something called the Jask-2.

The Jask-2 is a submarine-launched cruise missile, meaning the missile leaves the torpedo tube underwater, breaks the surface, ignites a flight engine, and then hunts a ship at sea level. Range is short, around 35 kilometers. Warhead is around 130 kilograms. The missile is based on a Chinese design called the C704, sometimes called the Nazer-1 in Iranian service. We covered the C704 in our video on the drone boats. The same missile. The drone boats fire it from the surface. The Ghadir-class fires it from below. And finally, the Ghadir can lay naval mines. The same mines we covered in our video on why the navy cannot clear the minefields. The same boats also carry frog men. Iranian special operations divers, four to six per mission, who can exit through a lockout chamber while the boat sits on the seabed. That is the platform. Seven sailors. Two torpedoes. Two missiles. A mine layer. A frogman transport. All inside a hull the size of a school bus. The first one entered service in 2007. There are more than 20 operational today. And Iran has just told the world that 16 of them are now actively patrolling the Strait of Hormuz as what their navy commander called invisible guardians. Now here is where it starts to matter. Last month, under our video on why the navy cannot clear the mines, a viewer named Ken left a comment that has stayed with us. I will quote him exactly. He wrote, "If its military infrastructure is shattered, how come they are still able to shoot down US aircraft and launch missiles?" That is the right question. That is exactly the right question. And the mini submarines are a big part of the answer. Iran's regular navy was destroyed. We covered that in our first video. 120 warships lost in 39 days. Frigates sunk. Corvettes gone. Patrol craft burning at their moorings. But the regular Iranian navy was never the threat in the strait. The threat in the strait has always been three things: mines, fast boats, and submarines. Three threats that exploit three different American weaknesses. We call this the three threat stack, and the third floor of that stack is what we are talking about today. So how does a navy that hunts Russian boomers in the deep Atlantic fail to stop submarines the size of a school bus in shallow water?

The answer is geography. Specifically, the geography of the Persian Gulf, which is a body of water that almost everything in American naval doctrine was not designed to fight in. The Persian Gulf is, on average, only about 50 meters deep. 50 meters! That is roughly the height of a 16-story apartment building. The narrowest part of the strait of Hormuz is barely 21 miles across, and the shipping channels inside it are narrower still. The water is warm. The bottom is cluttered with underwater pipelines, oil and gas well heads, and shipwrecks that go back to the 1980s. The surface above is choked with merchant traffic, even now under blockade. Compare that to where the United States Navy spent 50 years preparing to fight. The North Atlantic, the Norwegian Sea, the deep canyons west of the Aleutian Islands. Waters three to five kilometers deep. Cold water, clear acoustic conditions, almost no surface traffic. The American sonar fleet, the towed arrays, the underwater listening grids, the maritime patrol aircraft, the nuclear hunter-killer submarines themselves. All of it was built around one big idea. Find Soviet ballistic missile submarines in deep, cold, quiet ocean. And kill them before they could launch. That world is gone. The threat moved. Nobody updated the playbook. Here is what shallow water does to a sonar system. Sonar is the underwater equivalent of a flashlight, except using sound instead of light. You ping. The sound bounces off something. The echo comes back. From the echo, you guess the size, the shape, the distance, and the speed of whatever is out there. In deep water, the only things bouncing sound back are submarines, whales, and the occasional shipping container that fell off a freighter in a storm. The flashlight works. The picture is clear. The picture is: In shallow water, it does not work. The ping bounces off the seabed, then off the surface, then off pipelines, then off the hull of a fishing boat, then off the school of fish under the fishing boat, then off another section of seabed. By the time the echo gets back to the destroyer, it is not an echo. It is noise. The flashlight is on, but the room is full of mirrors. The American sonar operator hears a roar. Somewhere inside that roar, there is a school bus-sized submarine. The operator cannot tell which part of the roar is the submarine. Sometimes the operator cannot tell that the submarine is in the roar at all. This is not theory. This is well documented in the open literature. The Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, California has been publishing papers on the shallow water anti-submarine problem since the 1990s. The Hudson Institute has been raising the alarm for two decades. Brian Clark, a former Navy submarine officer who now writes for Hudson, has argued for years that the United States lost its institutional muscle for shallow water sub-hunting when it retired the Sturgeon-class boats and the diesel electric fleet in the early 1990s. He is not the only one. Jerry Hendricks of the Sagamore Institute has been making the same case in different words for almost as long. Now, consider what the Goddard does on top of all this. The Goddard runs on diesel electric propulsion, layman version. The boat has two power systems: a diesel engine for use on the surface or just under the surface and a bank of batteries for use when the boat is fully submerged. When the diesel is running, the boat is loud. The American sonar can hear it. When the diesel is off and the batteries are running, the boat is something else entirely. The boat is quieter than the ambient noise of the ocean itself. Quieter than the fish. Quieter than the propellers of the merchant ship two miles away. Quieter, in some recorded cases, than American nuclear submarines. And here is the part that nobody talks about. In the year 2005, the United States Navy ran a series of exercises off the coast of California against a Swedish diesel electric submarine called the Gotland. The Gotland is a real boat. Real crew. Real torpedoes that were not loaded for the exercise, obviously. The Gotland ran circles around the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group for the better part of two years. It penetrated the destroyer screen. It got within firing range of the carrier. Repeatedly. The Reagan was simulated sunk multiple times. The official navy line afterward was that there were lessons learned. There is an older example: 1981, NATO exercises in the North Atlantic.

A Canadian Oberon-class diesel electric submarine slipped through the escort screen of the USS Eisenhower and put simulated torpedoes into the carrier without ever being detected. The Eisenhower was a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered supercarrier. 5,500 sailors. 90 aircraft. The Oberon was a 60-year-old diesel boat with a crew of about 70. The boat that nobody could find. Folks, here's the math. A Gadir-class submarine costs an estimated $30 million to build. The exact number is classified, but defense analysts familiar with the program put it in the range of $20 to $30 million per hull. An Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the workhorse of the American surface fleet, costs around $2.2 billion. That is a ratio of 73:1. Iran can build 73 Gadirs for the price of one American destroyer. The C704 anti-ship missile, the one the Gadir fires from its torpedo tube, costs about $30,000 to $50,000 per round. The American counter to that missile, the standard missile, version 2 or version 6, costs between $2 and $4 million per round. That's a ratio of nearly 100 to 1 in favor of the cheaper weapon. Iran can shoot 100 anti-ship missiles for the price of one American interceptor. And the interceptor is not guaranteed to work. The missile is small, the water is warm, the horizon is short. This is asymmetric warfare. It is not a fair fight.

It was never supposed to be a fair fight. Iran is not trying to beat the United States Navy in a fleet engagement. Iran is trying to make the cost of entering the Strait of Hormuz unbearable. And the math says Iran is winning that argument. Iran has deployed 16 Gadir-class submarines into the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has laid the mines we covered three weeks ago. Iran has built drone boats by the dozen. The Pentagon has watched all of this happen for 20 years. The platforms cost less than a luxury car. The doctrine is older than most enlisted sailors. The Navy has the radar. The Navy has the seals. The Navy has the budget. So here is the question that matters at this point in the video. Is this incompetence or is this a Navy that has been told to wait? Write incompetence or orders in the comments because the people who say incompetence and the people who say orders are about to have a serious argument under this video. We are reading every reply. Now here is what nobody seems to want to talk about. The United States Navy used to know how to fight in shallow water. The Navy had its own diesel electric submarine fleet. The Navy had its own mine warfare doctrine.

The Navy had ships designed for the choke point. And in the early 1990s, after the Cold War ended and the budgets got cut, the Navy decided it did not need any of that anymore. The diesel boats were retired. The dedicated minesweepers were drawn down. The shallow water training command was shrunk. The institutional memory was allowed to walk out the door, one retiring chief petty officer at a time. That decision was made under the assumption that the United States would only ever fight enemies with deep water navies. The Soviet Union. Maybe China someday. There was no plan for a country with no real navy at all, fighting from inside a 21 mile wide strait with seven-man midget submarines and shore-launched missiles built from Chinese parts. A second viewer left a comment under our minds video that captures the institutional logic. He wrote it bluntly. Only idiots, he said, would replace a working ship with something that is not proven.

He was talking about the Avenger-class minesweepers. The same logic applies to the submarine fleet. The Navy retired its diesel boats. The replacements have not arrived. Thirty years later. So here is the second question of this video. Did the Navy forget how to fight in shallow water? Or did the Navy choose not to? Write "forgot" or "chose" in the comments. We are watching. This is where the conversation fundamentally changes for the average American. You may be wondering why any of this matters to you. You are not in the Navy. You do not own a ship in the Persian Gulf. The drone boats and the mines and the school bus sized submarines feel far away. Here is why it matters. About 60% of the world's seaborne oil trade transits through one strait. The same strait we are talking about? When ship insurance premiums for the Gulf doubled in March, that cost did not stay in Hartford. It got passed to the refineries. The refineries passed it to the distributors. The distributors passed it to the gas stations. And the gas stations passed it to the family minivan in the school parking lot at three in the afternoon. The same logic applies to home heating oil on the east coast which is going to come up again next winter unless something changes. And the same logic applies to industrial diesel, which is what runs the trucks that bring food to the grocery store. In other words, when the Navy cannot stop the submarines, the price of everything on the eastern seaboard goes up by some amount that nobody in Washington wants to print on the front of the budget.

There is a bigger picture too. 1988, Operation Praying Mantis, the largest American naval surface engagement since the Second World War. We mentioned the operation in our last video on the drone boats. I keep coming back to Praying Mantis because of one detail. Admiral Anthony Less, the commander on station, fought that battle with a fleet that had been trained for shallow water combat. The men in the Gulf in 1988 had practiced. They had Avenger-class minesweepers. They had SH-60 Romeo helicopters fitted with dipping sonar. They had diesel-electric submarine veterans on the staff. They had the institutional muscle. The Navy of 2026 does not have that muscle anymore. That is not nostalgia. That is the actual operational record. There is one more layer, and this is the layer that should keep the planners in the Pentagon awake at night. China is watching. The Taiwan Strait is also a choke point. The Taiwan Strait is also shallow water. The Taiwan Strait is also a body of water that the People's Liberation Army Navy has been studying for 30 years. China has been quietly building its own fleet of small diesel-electric submarines. The Yuan-class, the Song-class, variants we cannot publicly verify. China is also building the long-range anti-ship missiles. The shore-launched ones. The submarine-launched ones. The land-based ballistic ones. The math of the Strait of Hormuz. This exact math we have been discussing for the last 15 minutes is the same math that applies to the South China Sea and to the Strait of Formosa. If the United States Navy cannot solve this problem in Hormuz, it cannot solve this problem anywhere. And Beijing knows that. Iran is the rough draft. China is the final paper. The next 10 years are going to be decided by whether someone in Washington gets a serious answer to the question this video has been asking. So where does that leave us today? The Iranian regime, after 76 days of war, has built a sea-denial strategy that costs roughly 2% of what the American counter-strategy costs. The mines are in the water. The drone boats are running coastal patrols. And the mini-submarines are, according to Tehran's own announcement on the 11th of this month, on station as invisible guardians of the strait. The Central Intelligence Agency, in an assessment leaked to the Washington Post, most a week ago, told the president that Iran can outlast the American blockade for months. So here is the closing question. Where do you stand on the three-threat stack? Are mines plus drone boats plus submarines the new doctrine of the choke point? Or does the United States Navy still have the answer somewhere in a folder that has not been opened yet? Write three-threat or still got it in the comments. We are reading. This is animated military. We do not chase the headlines. We map the doctrine behind them. If you have not seen our breakdown of why the Navy cannot stop Iran's drone boats, watch that one next. The submarines and the boats are not separate threats. They are the same problem from two sides of the surface. The straight is one stack. We are still mapping it. That is the equation. We will see you on the next one.