Iran’s conventional navy is largely gone. The threat to the Strait of Hormuz is not
The United States and Israel have largely destroyed Iran’s conventional naval fleet in a massive bombing campaign since February 28.
But Tehran’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important shipping routes, has not diminished. Iran has effectively closed the narrow waterway, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies flow, by using asymmetric warfare tactics.
Besides Iran’s conventional navy, the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the elite branch of the country’s armed forces, has its own naval units that continue to hound and attack shipping in the Persian Gulf.
“While I think the Iranian Navy is largely combat ineffective at this point, the IRGC navy remains able to harass shipping,” said Sascha Bruchmann, a military and security affairs analyst at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“That maintains a specter of danger that most civilian shipping lines and insurers will find unacceptable,” Bruchmann added.
The United States has decimated Iran’s conventional navy since February 28.
The US military said on March 11 that it had sunk 60 Iranian vessels. Satellite imagery and publicly disclosed military footage suggest most of Iran’s naval fleet has been damaged or destroyed.
Iran changed its naval doctrine after the US Navy sank around half of Iran’s conventional fleet in a single day in April 1988. The attack was in retaliation for the mining of a US warship days earlier.
Experts say the incident showed Tehran that symmetrical naval warfare against a superpower was a losing proposition.
What followed was a decades-long pivot toward asymmetric tools such as fast-attack boats, shore-based anti-ship missiles, naval mines, midget submarines, and more recently, unmanned surface vessels (USVs) configured as floating bombs.
Iran institutionalized this split into two separate navies, symmetrical and asymmetrical forces.
The Iranian Navy, as part of the regular military, maintained a conventional fleet for prestige and occasional long-range deployments, including a transatlantic voyage as recently as 2021.
But the real warfighting instrument was the IRGC’s navy units, which were purpose-built for harassment and denial operations in the Persian Gulf’s shallow, island-cluttered waters, where geography compresses distances and partly neutralizes the advantages of a superior conventional force. [Continue reading…]