Most of the targeting is done by geography in the Strait of Hormuz. Megaboats squeeze through narrow, well-formed channels and the sea becomes littered shallow water, thousand tonne commercial traffic and clamorous acoustics that smear what sonar operators wish to hear. That is what makes the carrier question unavoidable: the carrier strike group can make a U.S. carrier ambush by an Iranian under the sea costly individually even when it cannot win a stand-up fight.
The maritime book of Iran is created to deny, rather than to command. A traditional missile arsenal may pose a danger to forces in the region, but it will not deliver a demonstrated performance against the U.S homeland. In the sea, the focus is turned towards making access hazardous: mines to slow down the movement, missiles on land to be punitive to predictability, small vessels to complicate identification, and submarines to make escorts waste time searching rather than screening.
The channels of Strait that are usable are few in number-shipping routes that squeeze traffic into pathways of a few miles across. The Ghadir-class midget submarines are the most numerous undersea platforms that Iran has in those corridors, which are designed to close in and work in littoral. It has been estimated that the fleet numbers approximately 23 boats and the fact that they are of diesel-electric type implies that they can silently operate on batteries even when submerged. They neither need to chase a supercarrier nor engage in the fight but endanger the connective tissue around it; escorts that are forced out of formation to attack contacts, replenishment ships that have to keep the group fueled, and the mine countermeasure effort that gets serious as soon as the first explosions or even plausible signs are detected.
That is where mine warfare ceases to be a sidebar and the operating environment. Iran is estimated to possess over 5,000 naval mines and U.S. officials have termed the naval mines loaded to ships in the Persian Gulf as an established preparation and not an operational field. The presence or absence of mines into the water, the operation of preparing them is operationally significant: it compels planners to believe that the Strait can become a clearance issue overnight and thus requires slower transits and rerouting, and special protective packages.
The best Iranian submarines are the three Russian built Kilo-class boats, locally known as Tareq-class, which were commissioned in the 1990s and are now based at Bandar Abbas. Their acoustic signature on batteries is so low that they have been given the “Black Hole” name, with the quieting methods including isolating vibrations, and applying hull treatments that give them greater invisibility. But limitations are as vital as magic. Kilo-class submarines are depth-based, and can hardly access most of the Gulf, and so their more convenient hunting ground is the deeper approaches to the end of the Strait and into the Gulf of Oman. Ready and maintenance also restrict the amount that can be ready at any time.
Iran has attempted to bridge the midget boats and heavy kilos with the Fateh class. Another recent occurrence, however, is a new development of the Fateh-class submarines, which has an air-independent propulsion plug, which is designed to provide longer underwater capability than batteries themselves. When implemented on scale, such endurance change is more about persistence: the capability to hover longer in probable transit zones and to be able to endure the peak of antisubmarine searches.
U.S. carrier strike group is not a single ship travelling on its own. There are also layered antisubmarine warfare in the form of ship sensors, MH-60R helicopters with sonobuoys, and P-8A Poseidon aircraft, which are designed specifically to ensure that the approach to the sea is not inexpensive and predictable. The real Iranian danger is, in other words, not a movie “carrier kill,” but a collection of undersea irritation: mines that introduce delay, submersibles that compel escort into time consuming prosecutions, and the constant potential that a logistics vessel or a screening destroyer can be the more attainable object. The simple engineering fact that has been in Hormuz is the chokepoint is narrow, and narrow spaces favor ambush.
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