01.06.12
The Green Pantywaists (an occasional PSA series)
In my continuing series of public service announcements on The Green Pantywaists, aka the Iranian military, a picture is worth thousands of words.
North Korean-style midget sub, around the size of the Civil War-era Hunley.
Add to this a couple old Kilo diesel subs, bought from the Russkis, about the country’s crown jewels, and that doesn’t say much — as this sort of supercilious note here implies.
Keenly aware of conventional U.S. military dominance in the region, Iran has adopted what strategists describe as an “asymmetric” approach.
Missiles mounted on civilian trucks can be concealed around the coastline, tiny civilian dhows and fishing vessels can be used to lay mines, and midget submarines can be hidden in the shallows to launch more sophisticated “smart mines” and homing torpedoes.
Iran is also believed to have built up fleets of perhaps hundreds of small fast attack craft including tiny suicide speedboats, learning from the example of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels who used such methods in a war with the government.
Sri Lanka, the island country which a long time ago was known as Ceylon — most will instinctively know, doesn’t have a Fifth Fleet.
“Assymetric,” of course, is the sickeningly overused jargon-word used to make something sound intellectual and fancy for stupid people — in this case, the description of the natural state of affairs that exists when a really small or lousy (or small and lousy) military is compared to ours.
It’s assymetric! We spend 100,000 times as much or even more as Iran does on our military, forcing them into assymetry! A comparison chart of the US and Iranian navies appears to be greatly assymetrical! That is, it lacks symmetry!
This is only to say the best minds aren’t our military theorists and national security experts. A number of whom are consulted for the news piece linked above, furnishing stuff you could have come up with for much less. Which also informs us their purpose is not really to provide any great value. It never is, the real function being to add a pseudo-scholarly quality to the assessment of war.
After all, where are we if we do not have our natsec think tank experts and retired military men to tell us such things? Rhetorical, obviously.
“They [Iran] can cause a great deal of mischief… but it depends how much pain they are willing to accept,” one of these personnel, Nikolas Gvosdev, “professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island,” tells the news agency.
The US Naval War College, for those from abroad who don’t, is not quite the same thing as the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD.
The former’s website is here. Located in the capitol for old swank money in Rhode Island, Newport, its website announces the school recently awarded someone you don’t know the “Hattendorf Prize.”
The Hattendorf Prize!
“The Hattendorf Prize was established on 7 December 2010 and first awarded in 2011,” informs Wiki.
Anyway, the “Nicholas Gvosdev” also posts at SITREP, the GlobalSecurity.Org blog to which this place syndicates posts.
The Atlantic Community has launched a new series of essays looking at the future of European security, specifically in resourcing and procurement …
Well, you’ve had enough of that to get the idea.
So now you know what you need to about potential war with the Iranian navy and our national security scholars for today. Iran loses 99 percent of its assets right quick in a shooting war over blocking Hormuz.