This Ready Room will be heavy on the maritime flavor. A lot of interesting things have come to the fore in recent days, the ones in this article having significant implications for the U.S. The era of hybrid warfare is upon us with a vengeance, as is a return of the Cold War’s hold-at-risk brinkmanship in the relations of adversaries with big navies. One would like to have a cheerful prognosis, but the word we actually need is this: Time is not on our side.
First, the maritime events advisory update.
The Ballad of Not Enough Carriers
USS Dwight D Eisenhower (CVN-69), having left CENTCOM to head home, arrived in Crete 25 June for a port visit.
USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71), earlier thought to be already headed from Southeast Asia to CENTCOM, is actually in South Korea, having arrived there 24 June for a joint exercise.
It appears the Biden administration is simply leaving a gap in carrier presence. The exercise TR is joining, FREEDOM EDGE, appears projected to run through the end of June. TR herself will probably leave this weekend and is still expected to head to CENTCOM afterward. It will be weeks until she arrives; my estimate, no earlier than mid-July.
It is what it is. As discussed back in February, U.S. Air Force strike-fighters in CENTCOM are being prohibited by host nations from conducting strike missions launched from their soil (confirmed about Qatar by journalist Benjamin Weinthal in his treatment of a MEMRI video here). With no carrier in theater, that means we have no serious deterrence presence versus Iran.
The Houthis in Yemen also know they almost certainly won’t be attacked on land – not in any significant way – in the absence of a U.S carrier.
The little pier that couldn’t
*Late-breaking*: Predictably, as of this posting (Friday midday), the pier is again being taken entirely offline (being removed from its point on the Gaza coast) due to weather.
From the AP report at the link: “Several U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss military movements, said the military could reinstall the pier once the bad weather passes in the coming days, but the final decision on whether to reinstall it hasn’t been made.”
Original text resumes…
Perhaps we should even call it the little pier that can’t even. The pier off Gaza was once again out of operation on Monday 24 June, after returning from a minor-waves-and-repair period last week. The pier was reattached on 19 June and briefly put back in operation. Due to a pile-up of arriving humanitarian aid at UN distribution hubs ashore, there was a limit to what could be reasonably moved through the reattached pier, and not much was brought across it between 19 June and Monday 24 June, when the pier closed for maintenance.
I initially made some sarcastic remarks about how exactly we got to an apparently “unforeseen maintenance” situation with this rascally pier. But network broadcasts on 25 June showed that the “maintenance” actually involved live visits from the reporting crews of ABC, NBC, and CBS, which were all suddenly struck with a passion to broadcast from the pier bobbing briskly off Gaza.
The datelines on their stories are all the evening of 24 June.
So that’s what the pier was really doing on maintenance day. Strangely, all three network Bigs wanted to do this three days before the presidential debate on Thursday 27 June.
As previewed by a “leak” to the New York Times, it looks likely that the pier operations will be terminated earlier than expected. Originally, taking weather into account, U.S. DOD envisioned keeping it in place until September. The “leaked” talk is said to now be that it will be removed and hauled away as early as July.
I urge readers once again to understand that the political purpose of this pier is not to impress voters in Michigan. It’s fatuous to claim that those voters even care about the delivery of aid in Gaza. What they care about is measures that hinder Israel – and opposing anything the U.S. seems to be doing that might assist Israel.
Thus, the protesters never say anything about the U.S. pier, nor do they waste time calling for more aid to Gaza. Their slogans are about accusing Israel of genocide, accusing Biden of complicity in it because of American arms sales to Israel, repeating the anti-Israel lies of Hamas about “starvation” in Gaza, and chanting “From the River to the sea,” which unlike anything Israel is doing or speaks of, is actually a call for genocide – genocide of the Jews of Israel.
The pier’s political purpose is to be a method of internationalizing a post-combat settlement in Gaza. It’s a “fact on the ground” that is intended to shape conditions ashore while combat is still in progress, and give the U.S. a stake in the settlement.
The pier’s purpose isn’t actually unannounced, but it is unemphasized. Team Biden’s determination to assemble a multilateral “solution” for a post-combat Gaza – one centered on the “two states” concept and giving the Palestinian Authority and Egypt leadership roles with a multinational coalition – has been reiterated a number of times in recent months. The pier is meant to be a wedge into Gaza for that purpose, precisely to make it physically impossible – and really inconvenient politically – for Israel to keep foreign third parties out.
But voters in Michigan (and Minnesota) are saying nothing about that. That’s simply not on their radar screen, nor is the pier’s ostensible purpose of aid delivery. What they yell about is U.S. arms deliveries to Israel, and allegations that American weaponry is being used in a “genocide.”
That is where Biden is trying to impress U.S. voters with his skepticism of Israeli policy and distancing of his administration from it. The pier is not a simple, direct method of making that political point. Withholding arms from Israel, and expressing specious “concern” about the use of U.S. arms in Gaza, is Biden’s election appeal. It’s not the pier. The pier is a real-world policy play meant to have a tangible effect on events and choices in the war being fought. The voters don’t care about it, except to think some version of “It’s stupid” and/or “It’s really being executed badly.”
Which incidentally, it’s actually not. There isn’t a way to deploy the pier, in the form it exists, significantly better than has been done in the conditions in which it’s being attempted. The conditions are a circumstantial risk incurred by Biden’s political insistence, not by stupidity on the part of the uniformed military that’s just executing orders.
In reacting to the absurd situation, consider that no American service members have been killed in this Quixotic operation. That would be the signal for the uniformed brass to start falling on their swords. At the moment, all that’s happening is that money is being spent uselessly. But the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, has wanted to keep doing it. His decision about that is what you pay for and elect him for. Complaints should be addressed to him. Please recognize that you don’t actually want the brass to be trying to overrule POTUS on these things.
In the meantime, it’s Israel making the pier increasingly a moot point. The IDF’s success in driving Hamas out of Gaza is the key to that. Not long from now, Israel will have a fait accompli: a Gaza devoid of operationally effective Hamas cells. In that condition, the opportunity for Biden to try and internationalize post-combat Gaza basically evaporates. It’s Israel’s controlled territory and Israel’s call.
For this reason, I expect we will in fact see the pier go away. It will have neither a “humanitarian” nor a political mission at that point.
The Russian drive-by
The short version of conventional comments about Russia’s recent warship visit to Havana is that it’s a resumption of a prominent Cold War pattern (a high-traffic one through the end of the 1980s), and in that sense it’s not good, but it’s not catastrophically dreadful either.
Readers don’t need a rehash of the conventional wisdom on that. What we could all use is an eye-opener with a map and some cruise missile threat rings, to set ourselves straight on a hole in our national defenses. It’s there. It’s not going away, and meanwhile, the threat is growing and has just been demonstrated.
The Russian task group was in Havana 14-17 June, and consisted of the former Udaloy-class destroyer, now converted-frigate Admiral Gorshkov; the Kazan, a Yasen-class nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN; NATO class nickname Severodvinsk); a heavy tug, the Nikolai Chiker; and a fleet oiler, the Akademik Pashin.
Russia has had larger surface combatants in Cuba and other Latin American ports in recent years. But it’s significant that both Admiral Gorshkov and the submarine Kazan are equipped with Kalibr (SS-NX-30A) long-range land-attack cruise missiles (LACM) with a range up to about 1,550 miles. And while they were in, and in proximity to Cuba, they were able to hold much of the Eastern U.S. at risk.
The land-attack Kalibr is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, although there was no indication the frigate or submarine had nuclear weapons on board.
But that capability clearly ups the ante on the real problem that America has next to no dedicated defenses against that threat.
The commentary is geared to the maps below. The threat rings for Kalibr-bearing vessels are depicted for missile origin points of Havana and a point southwest of Bermuda where units of the Russian task group were being tracked on 19 June, after they departed Cuba. As they advanced toward Cuba a week before, the Russian units were tracked through the same area, with observed surveillance by U.S and Canadian maritime assets off Georgia and Florida.
The maps show the extent and saturation of threat coverage by the Kalibr missile, which is similar in weapons profile to the U.S. Tomahawk, and has been used in real-world land attacks on Syria and Ukraine. Attacks on Syria involved launching the missiles from the Caspian Sea and flying them through Iranian air space. Russia has achieved success using the missiles with all their modern capabilities (such as full range and multiple course changes), as well as launching them for shorter attack profiles against Ukraine.
The problem on the U.S. end is that the only area where we have dedicated, constant-ready defenses against such a cruise missile threat is in the defense rings shown for the National Capital Region (NCR) around Washington, D.C.
Subsonic cruise missiles could be intercepted close to targets in the NCR by the array of anti-air weapons deployed there, including the U.S. Army Avenger system (intercept package includes Stinger missiles at up to 3.5 miles effective range) and the Norwegian-made NASAMS (the latest upgrade uses the AMRAAM-ER missile for an intercept range up to 25 miles). The Avenger reportedly downed a Russian cruise missile near Kyiv (Ukraine) in late 2023.
Those intercept systems along with radars and command/control elements are coordinated in a command center called the Joint Air Defense Operations Center (JADOC) at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Washington, D.C.
But there is no dedicated defense that would cover other potential targets on the U.S. East coast or in the eastern portion of the country, starting with New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, or Miami.
Since this is a cruise missile threat – powered flight – the ballistic missile intercept modes of Patriot and Aegis (ashore or afloat) are not applicable. The Navy Aegis’s SM-6 missile option can be used against cruise missiles (see p. 26/PDF p. 30). Patriot can be operated in an anti-aircraft mode suitable for cruise missiles as well [op. cit.]. None of these weapons families is available in the numbers needed for dedicated coverage of high-value targets in the U.S.
If we had to mount a defense today, surging out Navy Aegis platforms, the Ticonderoga cruisers and Arleigh Burke destroyers, would be the ready option. The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) can also perform an air defense role using the SM-6 interceptor. Norfolk, Virginia, where most of these ships are homeported on the East coast, is at the center of a high regional concentration of military bases – probable targets for threat cruise missiles – and would not be an inconvenient hub for deployments in case of need.
But with a limited number of combat-ready warships at a given time (as well as limited missile inventory), and the likelihood that, if an opponent were offshore threatening to shoot cruise missiles at us, the ready ships we did have would be fully tasked, there’s no question our homeland defenses are inadequate. Unlike Russia’s and China’s, our very long, ocean-exposed coasts in the temperate zone are highly accessible to cruise-missile-launching maritime platforms.
We don’t have inherent advantages in such a defense scenario to lessen the scope and cost of defending our major cities and military bases. We can see a Russian surface combatant coming, but the recent movements of the Russian flotilla are a reminder that we won’t always know where the quiet, new-generation submarines are (though I expect we did this time. This was a show-the-flag visit, not intended to play cat-and-mouse with us).
Missiles, missiles everywhere: Iran version
It’s also an essential point now that missiles may not approach North America in conveniently identifiable packages. I posted a major article on that problem in 2023, discussing the issue of China’s shipping-container-launched cruise missiles (and drones, for that matter) deployable in standard 40-foot containers on commercial container ships. To see some scenarios for incorporating such a capability in a hybrid-warfare attack in the Western hemisphere, please check out the article at the link.
It’s important to recognize the scope and depth of this development, and not get bore-sighted on what one foreign force or another has not yet done. It’s easy enough to say that the potential of China’s capabilities has not yet come to full fruition. We don’t have direct evidence of container-borne missile deployments by China, as far as the pubic knows. If China has crowed over launching missiles from shipping containers at sea, I’m not aware of it.
But we do know that Russia was the pioneer of shipping-container missiles, meaning that’s two of two nuclear-armed Asian global-power adversaries of the United States engaged in implementing such a capability. (The other three nuclear-armed Asian nations are ether not adversaries – e.g., India – or not global powers.)
And we know that Iran has also been working on a container-borne missile capability, has implemented it in a modified special-purpose former container ship – now in the fleet with the IRGCN – and in fact has crowed over a launch of ballistic missiles at sea from shipping containers used as missile chambers on that ship, the Shahid Mahdavi.
Moreover, the Shahid Mahdavi deployed in the last three months for operations said by Iran to be in the Indian Ocean, and to have come within missile range of the UK base on the island of Diego Garcia, used by the U.S. for multiple defense purposes including forward support for our nuclear-capable strategic bomber aircraft.
The brief backstory on Shahid Mahdavi is that she began her conversion from a standard container ship (operated by Iran’s main shipping line) to a special-purpose expeditionary base ship in 2022. Iran has another such ship, the Makran, which we tracked before in a lengthy round-the-world deployment from September 2022 to April 2023. But Makran was altered for fewer of the capabilities built into Shahid Mahdavi – notably having no special arrangements for shipping-container missiles.
Shahid Mahdavi’s use of deck-mounted containers can be seen in the images, along with her numerous chain guns (reminiscent, in their placement, of the openings for naval cannon on old ships of the line from 250 years ago) and a flight deck area for drones and helicopters.
But the capability Iran is clearly proudest of is the container-borne missiles. Earlier in 2024, probably in late January, Iran conducted two test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles from Shahid Mahdavi, off the southeastern coast of Iran with impact inside Iranian territory. The late-January window highlighted by satellite imagery in this tweet suggests the launch timeframe.
The missiles appear to be Fateh/Zolfaghar short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) variants, of which the Dezful missile is likely given its size and solid-fuel propellant. (It can be assumed for the time being that Iran will have to use solid-fuel ballistic missiles in this role, as they don’t require liquid fueling immediately before use, and can sit in containers for some time. The missiles need to be less than 40 feet in length; the Dezful comes in at 34 feet.)
In the interest of moving this along, I commend excellent summaries from other sources to your perusal. (For technical updates on the ship and others like her, always check in with H I Sutton.)
What I want to focus on is the Shahid Mahdavi deployment announced by Iran, which Iran said concluded on 18 May 2024, and lasted 39 days, with a venture across the Equator in the Indian Ocean, the drive-by of Diego Garcia, and an unrefueled endurance period for at least part of it. (The IRGCN commander’s implication was that the whole voyage was unrefueled, which is feasible without extra heroics if the ship went only as far as depicted in the video commemorating the trip.)
Iranian claims
As with virtually all Iranian announcements of this kind, there’s sorting to be done among stray comments, heroic and often cryptic claims, and known collateral data points (such as commercial satellite imagery showing where a highly identifiable ship like Shahid Mahdavi was on a given date).
In this case, the trip that ended 18 May, we have two quality data points. One is the end date of 18 May. The other is satellite imagery showing that Shahid Mahdavi was just off the Iranian coast on the Arabian Gulf on 13 April 2024.
Thus, whatever the ship did during the announced deployment had to fit between 13 April and 18 May – which notably is 35 of the 39 days alluded to by Admiral Tangsiri, the IRGCN commander. In other words, Shahid Mahdavi might have been further off the coast prior to 13 April 2024, but on 13 April she was back very close to the coast. Any continuous long-haul deployment would have started on or after that date.
Let’s be sure to note two things before moving on. One is that the test launches of the container-borne ballistic missiles appear to have taken place in an underway window between 25 and 27 January 2024. Alert readers may recall what was going on at the time; i.e., the U.S., having come under fire for months from Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria (including the lethal strike on “Tower 22” in Jordan), was making daily threats about a continually delayed retaliatory strike.
The strike itself was executed on 2 February 2024. Shahid Mahdavi’s missile launches cannot possibly have been unrelated to that freighted sequence. In retrospect, they look like a demonstration intended to send a message about Iranian capabilities – during the period of U.S. threats and delays concerning a retaliatory strike.
Likewise, 13 April, the day Shahid Mahdavi was imaged immediately off the Iranian coast just outside the Strait of Hormuz, was the day of the massive missile and drone barrage launched by Iran and Iran’s proxies in Syria and Iraq against Israel.
Then, according to IRGCN commander Admiral Tangsiri, sometime after that image, the ship took off in a southerly direction to make its demonstration near Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
During that trip, Iran stated that Shahid Mahdavi crossed the Equator on 3 May 2024. The announcement was made on 4 May, and was evidently intended to draw attention to what the ship was doing. It was left implicit that Shahid Mahdavi came within threat range of Diego Garcia, until the ship was being welcomed home and her adventures extolled. At that point, the derring-do of approaching Diego Garcia was highlighted (see the video in the tweet.
(Additional maps further below.)
U.S. awareness of Shahid Mahdavi’s activities at the time is indicated by a visit to the Diego Garcia area by a specialized Air Force collection platform, a Boeing RC-135W Rivet Joint, on 4 May 2024. (A WC-135R “nuke sniffer” flew to the same area on 16 May, but Shahid Mahdavi was nearly back to Bandar Abbas by then.)
But it was also at that point that things started getting a little fuzzy. Iran made some interesting claims in the post-voyage account, some of which could not be true. It’s not clear why the claims apparently were made. But here we go.
One point highlighted was that Shahid Mahdavi’s crossing of the Equator was the first for the IRGCN. For ocean-going mariners that’s not exactly a modern navy milestone, and in fact, the IRIN – the “Iranian Army Navy,” or regular navy – had already crossed the Equator a number of times before, including the 2022-23 round-the-world voyage and at least one prior Kilo-class submarine trip to Southeast Asia. The “first” was for the IRGCN.
Iran clearly wanted to emphasize it as a deployment milestone for the naval force that would be used by the Iranian regime for offensive power projection i.e., the IRGCN. I’m confident that the national command and control structure for ballistic missiles was meant to be understood as significant, in the long-range movement of a ballistic-missile-shooting IRGCN ship.
The timing and the emphasis certainly fit together, at a time when Iran and Israel are at odds, the U.S. is stonewalling and finessing our policies in the region, and there’s a shooting war in progress between Iran’s proxies and Israel.
This was also when the IRGCN stressed that Shahid Mahdavi had completed the trip without using any shore support for refueling. Long-time readers may recall that in my 2023 account of the Makran deployment, I reconstructed how Makran and her escort, the frigate Dena, must have used offshore anchorage for refueling (Makran refueling Dena) to get across the vast, remote South Pacific region of Oceania. Iran doesn’t have an underway refueling capability. The ships had to be tethered and buffered in a protected area like a cove so they couldn’t accidentally collide during a refueling event between them.
So, contrary to that evident special requirement of the Makran voyage, Shahid Mahdavi, we’re told, made no such rest stops. The relatively short Indian Ocean trip depicted by the IRGCN would have been feasible under that unrefueled condition.
One of the things that jumps out from the I.O. trip, however, is that Iran could certainly mean for Israel (and the U.S., for that matter) to take it as an example of what Iran can do, which would not be limited to taking a trip in that particular south-southeasterly direction. The message, moreover, need not be limited to Shahid Mahdavi as the missile-launcher.
Something like “Yo, Israel, I can get ballistic missiles in containers on random ships close to you, and fire when I want” would be a timely and obvious message. “Oh, and I could scoot away afterward in a ship with a tidy amount of unrefueled endurance. Contemplate that your situation isn’t that different from Diego Garcia’s.”
The final little collection of utterances from Iran is odd. I can’t account for why Iran would have made official announcements about these points, as they seem so improbable. One thing is certain: they can’t both be true. It seems unlikely that either of them is.
And really “out there” claims
One is a claim that Shahid Mahdavi crossed the Equator and the Prime Meridian during her trip in April and May. Since the Prime Meridian (0 degrees longitude) runs through London and just nicks the western edge of the Mediterranean Sea further south, I find this very doubtful.
It’s impossible for the ship to have done this even further south, off Africa’s West coast, in the time available between 13 April and 18 May. Coupled with the fueling issue, that scenario can be discounted out of hand. (A map below shows the location of the Prime Meridian.)
If we stipulate that Shahid Mahdavi did indeed cross the Equator north to south on 3 May, it’s just possible for her to have achieved the Prime Meridian feat by going through the Med and coming back, but that would have meant entering and exiting through the Suez Canal (and passing through the Red Sea), an exploit that couldn’t possibly have gone unnoticed.
Que “Mal”-a maneuvers?
So I conclude that this didn’t happen (though we’ll look at it a bit more below). The other dubious claim from Shahid Mahdavi’s welcome-home party was the statement that the ship went through the Strait of Malacca.
Iranian warships have gone through the Strait of Malacca before (Makran and Dena being two of them, in the fall of 2022), but the time factor on this trip, with its 35 available days, while not straining credulity to the breaking point, would make it a pointless use of a ship’s time (i.e., it would be running out to a turn-around point just to turn around). It’s also very likely that Shahid Mahdavi would have been seen in the SOM if she’d ventured there. She’d be peculiar and unmistakable, sticking out like a sore thumb to seasoned mariners and coast-watchers.
One remote possibility, for which I emphasize I have no specific, affirmative evidence, is that Shahid Mahdavi visited the Maldives (or at least did something off the Maldives) during time that could be accounted for by claiming the ship went east to tag the SOM.
What sparks this speculation is a peculiar report in early June that the Maldives, which resumed relations with Iran in September 2023 (shortly before the 10/7 massacre), announced a ban on Israeli visa travel to the island nation on 2 June 2024. The excuse: the Maldives is on the Hamas side of the conflict with Israel.
Curiously, on the same day the Maldives restored ties with Iran (25 September 2023), USAID, headed by Samantha Power, announced an investment package for the Maldives.
The travel ban appears on its face to be connected to the January 2024 drone attacks on Israeli oil tankers in the Maldives, attributed by many analysts to Iranian sponsorship. (The drone attacks were some three weeks before the ballistic missile launches from Shahid Mahdavi, for those keeping track.) Whether the Muslim-majority Maldives was complicit in that shipping attack, or merely seeking to get out of the line of fire afterward, the ban on Israeli travel looks like an appeasement (or cooperation) gesture toward Iran. (The Maldives, notably, expressed full support on 13 May for the “genocide” case brought by South Africa against Israel in international court.)
In the interim, the new president of the Maldives, Mohamed Muizzu, who was elected in November 2023, won a major victory in a parliamentary election in April 2024, significantly strengthening his governing coalition. His government is now turning noticeably away from India and toward China in its choice of great-power connections.
The U.S Congress jumped in with both feet to get Maldives to reconsider its travel move against Israelis. This past week, Secretary Antony Blinken met with the foreign minister of the Maldives in Washington, D.C.
This all seems like really vigorous, quick-response action, considering the things the U.S. moves much more slowly on. It catches my eye, and if I had to bet, I’d bet it wasn’t meaningless that Shahid Mahdavi was tooling around, probably with time on its hands, near the Maldives in its recent, waters-parting deployment under IRGCN command.
Hopes and dreams, IRGCN-style
A bit more analysis of these assertions does bring us some useful illumination for the future. It’s possible Iran made the claims as a warning to the U.S., possibly Israel, and even perhaps other nations (e.g., in Europe) about the capabilities Iran soon intends to have. A claim about advancing on the Prime Meridian, in a trip marked by zooming Diego Garcia, might not be true now. But it would goose the American situational orientation: present a jolt about what Iran would soon be capable of.
As with Israel, Iran would want us to know that the day is coming when shipping containers could show up off our coasts bearing ballistic missiles.
Here’s a map presentation depicting three scenarios. First, how far Shahid Mahdavi would have had to travel to get within Dezful missile range of the United States. Spotting you the information below from Admiral Tangsiri on Shahid Mahdavi’s top speed and unrefueled endurance, we see that such a voyage was not feasible at all under the conditions of the 13 Apr-18 May 2024 window.
Cited from Jane’s at Old Salt Blog: “IRGCN Commander Rear Admiral Alireza Tangsiri described Shahid Mahdavi as a multi-purpose long-range vessel that … can carry 41 tonnes of cargo that can include helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), fast attack craft, long-range cruise missiles, and air-defense systems. He added that the 240 m-long ship has an endurance of 18,000 n. miles and a top speed of 18 kt.”
(These are typical figures for the Panamax ship type.)
Second, we see how far the ship would have had to go to reach the Prime Meridian, just east of the Strait of Gibraltar. Although it’s theoretically feasible to have brought this off, I consider it extremely improbable, especially if such a venture was combined with the 3 May crossing of the Equator as depicted in the Indian Ocean. Aside from the Suez Canal issue, the high speed, while the ship is capable of it, would have run the fuel state down far below what any prudent mariner would accept, if the trip was actually made without refueling.
Finally, the basic trip depicted in the Iranian media briefing video is assessed. It could have been brought off with a low average speed of advance between 13 April and the Equator crossing date of 3 May, and then between that crossing and the return to port in Iran on 18 May.
Adding an excursion through the Strait of Malacca to that basic trip would have had no reasonable purpose. The same constraints or improbabilities of time, speed, and fuel use apply to that claim as to the one about the Prime Meridian.
It’s not clear why Iran is chronically given to making weird or absurd claims about naval activities. But it’s not a waste of time to pursue analysis of them. It gives insight about where Iran is in its thinking, messaging, and vision.
One thing we can note about Iran and the Prime Meridian is that when Makran and Dena returned from their round-the-world trip in 2023, they crossed the Prime Meridian on the way home around Southern Africa.
There had been a lot of attention paid to their deployment when the media and the public didn’t know where the ships were, and imagined in January and February 2023 that they would be approaching Brazil for a port visit from the East. But the ships were actually coming from the West – from their long haul across the South Pacific – and doubled Cape Horn to get to Brazil.
From what I could tell, hardly anyone reporting their activities in Western media ever figured that out. (Iranian media confirmed it at the end of the deployment, however.) On that round-the-world trip, the two ships transited the Strait of Malacca, the Equator, and the Prime Meridian. They left home by turning east out of the Arabian Sea, and returned going south around Africa.
Moreover, during an even earlier voyage in 2021, a separate Iranian task group with Makran had come south around Africa and proceeded up its West coast to Europe, where it went all the way to the Baltic to participate in Russia’s Navy Day that year.
That task group – IRIN ships – would have crossed the Equator and Prime Meridian multiple times during its transit, whether it included a purported homebound route through the Med and Suez Canal or not.
Iranian warships are already veterans of the globe’s maritime “sea-marks.” Perhaps Admiral Tangsiri only wanted to issue a reminder of that.
But I hear him also making a point that an IRGCN ship – one armed with ballistic missiles and under the ayatollah’s orders – has now ventured out to crash the gates of maritime prowess. The stray remarks about Malacca and the Prime Meridian function as prompts to take stock of how far abroad Iran is actually going, and with what. We needn’t overplay the magnitude of the maritime feats to recognize that for the Iranian regime’s declared enemies – Israel and the United States – the message in the shipping containers is: “We’re coming.”
Feature image: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Felix Garza Jr. (Via Wikimedia Commons)
The Optimistic Conservative 