For India and the rest of energy-hungry Asia, the strategic hinge is the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Energy Information Administration figures for 2018, still the standard reference, put its flow at about 21 million barrels a day, roughly 21% of global petroleum liquids consumption. Any contest for that waterway is a freight-rate story before it is a war story, which is why the long standoff between Iran’s two navies and the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain keeps analysts watching the gulf.
The Iranian challenge is built asymmetrically, on the record shows. The Revolutionary Guard’s naval arm, the IRGCN, runs hundreds of small fast-attack craft designed for swarm tactics in the gulf’s shallow, confined waters: surrounding a targeted ship, cutting across its bow, harassing military and commercial traffic, at times diverting foreign vessels in response to sanctions. These boats are cheap, fast and increasingly lethal, and regional commanders have at times acted boldly without orders from the supreme leader. The regular Islamic Republic of Iran Navy is a different instrument: an aging, green-water fleet that mostly serves as a diplomatic tool, training with Chinese and Russian naval forces and making port calls in Sri Lanka and China.
The incidents are documented. In April 2021, Iranian fast inshore attack craft closed to an unnecessarily close range around the USS Firebolt and the USCGC Baranof, a nearest approach of 68 yards, ignoring bridge-to-bridge radio warnings. Weeks later, thirteen fast-attack craft came within 300 yards of American vessels in the strait until the USCGC Maui fired warning shots. General Kenneth McKenzie Jr. told Congress that American forces faced the first time since the Korean War of operating without complete air superiority. In August 2022, an IRGCN support ship, Shahid Baziar, was caught towing a Saildrone Explorer unmanned vessel of the U.S. 5th Fleet; the USS Thunderbolt responded, a helicopter went up from Bahrain, and the Iranian ship let go after about four hours. Vice Adm. Brad Cooper called the actions “flagrant, unwarranted” and pledged U.S. forces would “fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows” across the region.
Iran calibrates all of it, analysts note, to stop short of war. The lessons of the 1980 Iran-Iraq War, in which tens of thousands died, taught Tehran a doctrine of denial, dispersal and calibrated aggression that raises costs without triggering one. The counter-architecture is institutional: the 34-member Combined Maritime Forces, the U.S.-led task force for gulf security that Washington has commanded 10 times, and the International Maritime Security Construct formed in July 2019. For shipping insurers and oil traders across Asia, that balance, muscle along a chokepoint, is the number that never leaves the screen.
Sources
- Iranian Maritime Threats: An Opportunity for the U.S. Navy | Center for International Maritime Security
- Iran says it seized 2 US unmanned vessels in Red Sea | The Jerusalem Post
