Iran’s navy: Stealth-stalking the planet

On 9 March 2023, a webcam caught Iranian frigate IRIS Dena (F-75) underway departing Rio de Janeiro at the end of an extended port visit that began on 26 February 2023.

Forward support base IRINS Makran (441) was presumably in company with Dena.  Although Iran’s leaders have threatened to send the two-ship flotilla through the Panama Canal on this “round the world” deployment, it has been a vexed question from the beginning where the ships are at a given time, and it isn’t clear if they’re headed for the canal now.

There is naturally speculation that the warships will stop in Venezuela next.  If they do, they could already be off the coast from Caracas given their departure from Rio on Thursday.

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U.S. Navy assets update in Ukraine crisis

Reader “Your Opinion Please” posed questions to me on carrier movements at this earlier post, and I am copying the response here (see below) to provide a general update.

There is no change in the U.S. military posture in the Mediterranean or Black Sea.  That’s the basic point to take away.  The activities we’re seeing are routine and predictable.  Because of the geography of the Ukraine problem, no NATO naval power can realistically be brought to bear on it, and any signals sent with naval power will be political, collateral, and temporary.

As mentioned in the previous post, the carrier USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77) and her strike group are in the Mediterranean,

USS Mount Whitney, USS Taylor both in Black Sea ports

USS Taylor in Samsun, Turkey. (Image credit: 6n1k.com.tr via Bosphorus Naval News; links in text.)

The U.S. warships in the Black Sea continue to be nowhere near Ukraine, except in the sense of being closer to Ukraine than they would be if they were in port in Spain.

USS Taylor (FFG-50), the frigate, which was last heard of running her propeller aground

Russian navy: First port visit to Egypt (among others) in 21 years

Suddenly, even Vladimir Putin looks more attractive.  He looks, at least, like he actually intends to fight radical Islamism – in some of its varieties anyway.  In theory, he has some pull with Iran.  He can exert a certain level of “check” on the Syria crisis.  His relatively well armed nation sits on the other side of Erdogan’s wild-card Turkey, which keeps bouncing from China to Iran to NATO and back again.  He’s not “Europe” – not really – but “Europe” acknowledges that he has to be given a place at the table.

Maybe he doesn’t look attractive, exactly; maybe the word is interesting.  Whatever it is, it’s showing up in real forms now, in regional nations’ decisions in the Eastern Mediterranean.  Last week came the flurry of reports that

Peace in our time: Asian Navies converging on the Mediterranean

While Russia’s “interfleet naval task force” tootles around the Eastern Mediterranean making like it doesn’t know from Syria, China and India have joined the naval game in the Eastern Med.  Both have a regular naval presence off the coast of Somalia, and each has dispatched its most recent antipiracy task group – now relieved on-station – to conduct port visits in the Med.  The Chinese units are visiting ports in the Black Sea as well.