Sometime ago, the Iranian Minister said that a US Navy aircraft carrier would be an easy target for 300 speed boats armed with Katyusha rocket launchers. Is this true?
07.06.2025 00:10
The Zuni which caused that disaster was 127mm with a 40lb warhead. The Chinese Type 63 (as used on Iranian bandit boat roof launchers) is 107mm with about a 5lb warhead. Do not think that if 1–5 of those hit a 1,000ftX200ft flight deck target, and somehow managed to connect with a 480 gallon EFT on a Super Hornet that the outcome would be any less lethal than the Aero-300 on that A-4E.
But rather cooperatively, in concert with the Peykaap/Zulfigar and Tareq FAC-M
Which is to say, the ability to support actions on both sides of the SOH from within the Bandar E Lengeh or Bandar Abbas ADIZ and to threaten the Manama/Jufa USN bases and Ras Jumail oil terminals from Bandar E Busheyr or possibly even Bandar E Khomeini.
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The final Khalij Fars salvos leave their triple launch rails.
Should they feel they cannot penetrate USN AWS missile defenses (Standard, ESSM, RAM) they will instead attempt short range, saturation attacks with ballistic weapons (as all RIM-174, RIM-162, RIM-116 now also have Surface to Surface as well as Surface to Air modes). And if that doesn’t seem viable then mine/suicide/ballistic strikes with nuclear systems must not be discounted.
………………………………………C-802..………………………………………………….. 200km
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Again, if possible, all ASCM will be launched from close-in, as the CSG passes in single file, so that they overlap the next round of ship launched weapons from the FAC-M and some of the WPBs. As a second wave of Khalij Fars is launched (only these having the speed to get there in time to continue the Roll Back defense), the first wave of Coastal ASCM will arrive.
Per Day.
At this point, the rest of the Patrol Coastal Interceptor force will step out from the commercial traffic radar shadows and begin closure to fire Kowsar or Noor as SM-2/6 and ESSM start to engage the missiles, the point being to make Aegis so busy with the AAW mode engagement that it allows the MRL equipped boats to get close and fire their 107mm cluster before the SSR mode of the SPQ-9 nav radar can cue either Sea Hellfire or Griffin mini-missiles to engage the bandit boats.
Finally, understand that Iran has multiple civilian ships and likely foreign flagged covert platforms, acting as both tenders and perhaps carriers, in the fashion of the old German Commerce Raiders.
Good fire density, potential for reloads onboard, much shorter, lighter, rocket (4ft, 60lbs vs. 9ft, 140lbs) and thus a range of only 6–8km vs. over 20km.
The issue then becomes that the various Ashoura, Cougar, and Cat-14 class ships which typically carry X12 of these are not going to be operating alone-
And that’s the Good Ending.
ARGUMENT:
…………PCI……PCI……PCI…..PCI……PCI……PCI…..…PCI…..PCI……PCI….10–20km
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Their best are probably the Noor series-
The goal keepers literally put their hulls between the Carrier and the inbounds, absorbing both final missiles, gunfire and possible torpedo attacks from the PCIs and taking 1–2 rams by the Seraj-1, if they have to.
Because of the narrows, the fleet will likely already be at Condition 1 AAW with the ship battened up, all hands manning battle stations and all radars active but dummy loaded, to avoid giving precision ESM locations. The Iranian ASBM will fire first, from furthest, and as the missiles clear the engagement horizon for SM-3 and SM-6, select ships will come up to provide midcourse and TVM with these RIM-156 and RIM-174 missiles or RIM-161, depending on the trajectory apogee.
What do you think of Obito Uchiha?
With SAL or IRH homing and 8–10km range.
CVT…………………………..FFG………………………………..CVT……………………...100–200km Noor
Tareq (top) PCM
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Iranians Being Iranians
The actual SOH are roughly 21nm by 52nm and so any shallow draft platform (including innocuous dhows and other small, civilian, craft big enough to hide multiple bandit boats behind them) are going to be able to have full run. Some 33,000 high value ships pass through that narrows, annually, with 15,000+ more small tramp steamers and fishing/pleasure/raider craft.
Especially if E-3C are not available and E-2D are not up, ‘rotating and radiating’ (which is forbidden in the SOH for ships or air), the long range missiles will come first. If AEW&C are up, they will see the shots coming, from around 70-100nm, more for ballistics and will relay CEC picture to all hulls and the AAW commander to coordinate.
Houdong/Tondar Corvette
IRGCN/IRIN Ship Guide
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Where possible, USN escorts will sprint up taking intermediate positions to shield the CSG, from all sides, biased towards the threat lane. This may leave gaps which the Kilo SSKs can take advantage of so helicopters will begin to spool up, tails will be deployed and proactive Yankee Search will likely begin to boil some water.
CAT-14
These use the optical adjunct on the masthead to cue and so don’t reacquire radar designation. They have engagement ranges of 5–15km and, along with RAM, would be a primary rocket boat killer but it needs to be understood that the engagement range margin is narrow at best, especially for a swarm of about 20–30 boats and the shotgun effect 12X30= 360 rounds of 107mm rockets from the cabin roof launchers is going to draw large beaten-sea impact zone around all targets which amount to football field length overlaps of shotgun spray.
Mission Control: Eye of the Storm - NASA (.gov)
The explosion blew off a good sized chunk of the starboard bow, dumping MORE bombs, all the way down to the 03 level, as burning fuel entered the daytime sleeping quarters of ‘the nightshift’.
LINKS-
…………………………………….Soumar Nuclear Cruise……..………………….900km
Iran’s Stealth Corvette, The Martyr Al Mahdi
Others may be licensed Kowsar variants of the Chinese light weight coastal defense C-701 ASCM missiles with (C-704) TV/IRH homing-
PLA Cruise Missiles / PLA Air
Way back in…’67 I think. HERO closed the loop on a Zuni rocket on a Phantom which plowed into a Scooter across the way, splashing something like 1,800 gallons of JP-4 across the flight deck like an exploding soda can. This then flashed up about 8 fighters sitting on the foredeck, along with a bunch of ‘vintage’ M65 (WWII) 1,000lb bombs ‘because there was no bomb shortage in Vietnam’.
Oil Shippers Continue Sailing Through Strait of Hormuz - with Heightened Security
Based on the Chinese C-802 which, in turn, is likely an MM.38 Exocet or perhaps Type 2 JMSDF derived AShM. Initially capable of ranges on the order of 70–100km, after 20+ years of tinkering, these supposedly now have flight distances of over 200km (thanks to Soumar cruise missile turbine technology inserts and heavy fuel).
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This is the point where a conventional attack probably ends with multiple CG/DDG ablaze or sinking as brave men die saving their fellow sailors and airmen on a carrier which is still no-WOD unable to launch fixed wing jets and thus left naked against secondary attacks, mines and a possible submarine threat.
La Combatante/Sina Corvette
Insuring The Elephant Walk
Noting that these no longer necessarily require Martyrs to achieve hits but can be remote piloted, in a fashion similar to the Ukrainian Sea Baby USV. Or even semi-autonomous, with AI driven optical seekers like an enhanced LINSE boat (driver bails out as he puts boat into high speed, eyes open, mode).
Iranians Being Iranians Pt. Deux
Excellent Strategic Summary
SS John Burke, Hit By Kamikaze Off Mindoro PI, December 28,1944, 2 Kiloton Equivalent Explosion
Now Hiring Speed Boat Martyrs, Complete Health Plan Included!
Bladerunner Sport. And Then He Activated The Turbos…
Here is the Bad Things Happen To Idiots alternate, where things get funny-ha-ha-not because, in Persian, Seraj can mean various things. From Guide Lamp to The Sun. And what looks more like the beacon to Paradise to a bunch of Islamic nuts living out their Cap’n Jack Sparrow fantasies, than 20 kilotons of Canned Sunlight?
The Straight of Hormuz is controlled like an airport ATC, via the TSS or Traffic Separation Scheme. A pair of 3km wide, deepwater, shipping channels, through the sanded shallows and wrecks of the area, with a 5km gap between them. One going in, the other coming out. It takes MILES to stop a VLCC or Product Carrier so these are more or less single lane highways with limited or no passing and no U-Turns.
The Seraj-1, based on the British Gladstone Challenger offshore speed racer, increase speed to 80–100 knots and begin to overtake the leading Cougar, Tareq and Zulfigar lead suppression swarm, themselves closing at 40–50 knots through a series of powered yaw-slide evasions to throw off 5″ gunfire with Mark 156 HE-IR rounds.
H I Sutton - Covert Shores
With the USN formation broken and/or burning, and probably half the PCI as well, closure by the latter continues to ‘guns range’ on their 12.7/14.5mm as the Seraj-1 suicide boats come crashing through the outer screen and the third wave of Khalij Fars enters terminal homing phase.
This was the result-
The individual rockets, even fired in salvo, by a few boats, mean nothing. But _in coordination_, the Combined Arms synergies of dealing with the FAC-M; Rocket Boat PCI; ICD Coastal Missiles; and ASBMs, along with the increasing potential of a (maybe nuclear) suicide boat threat is what ‘brings it all together’ as the MRLs are a breaching tool to open the door to the inner zone of the CSG, while it’s already strung out in line astern, as the DDG escorts are driven off line for a few tens of seconds, long enough to penetrate the atomic elephant riders.
PG Threat Assessment Key To Controlling Escalation
To prevent nuclear retaliation requires nuclear first strike options. And of course if they end up hypocentering Tel Aviv, then blasting the carrier response force which is sent against them in turn. At that point Iran has no future. But
Boooom.
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Best Case, the MRL rockets move too fast to be intercepted (max speed 1,260fps, average velocity 750fps) and/or several of the destroyers delay their evasion turn and take multiple enfilading hits, raking the deckhouse, which, again, knock out some of their SPY-1 radar panels entirely, creating engaged-side blind zones as SPQ-9 struggles to take over the lolo cuing role and Iranian IR homing AShM begin to arrive. This is why we moved from a 21 shot Mk.49 RAM launcher to an 11 shot Mk.15 Mod-31 SeaRAM equivalent to take advantage of onboard radar as self-cue in anticipation of loss/saturation of primary AAW sensors.
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DocumentCloud
Shahid……………………………………………………………Shahid….Shahid…….20km
AUSAirpowerNet, Chinese Antiship Missiles
And ranges on the order of 25km, taking the shooter just over the horizon radar. None of which will sink, even a destroyer or cutter.
Safir Kish OPV/Cutter
The AAW destroyers turn away, creating large wakes for the bandit boats to cross over, even as they also mask their foredeck Mk.45/54 and 62 guns and potentially some of the AEGIS panels as the hard to jam (EO) missiles and dumbfire rockets come in, together, making it hard for the Mk.15 and Mk.15 Mod-31/RIM-116 (also on the foredeck but with an additional unit aft, above the helicopter hangar) to engage even a quarter of the going-to-hit majority.
It isn’t. Because the PG is not a carrier sized battlespace. Not at the 21nm entry at the Gate of Hormuz. Not at it’s 182nm widest point.
If there was a single good thing that derived from that rolling goat fuck of errors, it was that rockets left the fleet in less than two years and have never come back and we began serious scheduling of ordnance lives to put the high value asset ahead of the lowest bid ammunition.
Individual officers grabbed men off the hangar deck, raided fire lockers and waded back into the flames, one after having been literally blown off the deck into the suicide nets below. Sixteen hours later, the casualty was more or less under control (part of 02 and most of 03 were still too hot to enter) 134 men were dead and another 161 were injured as the entire crew would continue fighting fires in 200 compartments, all the way back to the pier at Cubi Point in the Philippines. It would take 73 million dollars of repairs and 5 months of yard time before CVA-59 would sail again.
Al Mahdi Corvette
………Khalij Fars……………………Khalij Fars……………………Khalij Fars…..300km
Keeping in mind, that it was the presence of Iranian mines, sown by small coastal freighters outside the SOH which caused the U.S. to begin aggressive actions against the IRGCN and rapidly brought to a close the Iran/Iraq War as Lloyds refused added War Risk Insurance coverage beyond the immeidate conflict zone.
Strait of Hormuz - Assessing the Threat - The Strauss Center
What is important, is the missiles which go with. Some of these are likely reverse engineered Hellfire/TOW hybrids, like the Shafagh-
Iran Hints at Using Suicide Speedboats in Clash with U.S. Navy in Persian Gulf
A for-real elephant walk, complicated by multiple underwater navigation hazards, haze and occasional sandstorms big enough to hide a 1,000ft VLCC like a mouse in a hay loft. And that’s without the power boat hill billy’s larking about like it was a NASCAR rally, within a hull length of the escort bows.
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This is not the 1980s with Boghammars armed with DShK and RCL folks. Update your threat catalog. Realize The First Spartan Rule: that the other side watches us learning how to beat our best play and so it’s truly unwise to spend too many summers teaching them when you just don’t need to go there.
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Missiles of such range offer the ability to stagger launch from dispersed formations using the USN model of distributed operations with loiter hold and throttle up to ensure common time on target while also operating in concert with older C-101 Silkworm and C-201 Seersucker fixed sites and mobile C-802 TELs as coastal defense missiles. Along with the newer, 300km, Khalij Fars (Persian Gulf) ASBM which operates from fixed sites, well inland, with triple rail launchers and an IR Seeker. All of which are relatively jam-proof using SLQ-32/59/62 SEWIP (though not ODIN).
It only takes one of the latter to make a CSG, dependent on concentrated defensive AAW networking to knock down missiles, a battle group casualty.
With that in mind, here is a _highly simplified_ understanding of how an Iranian strike on a U.S. CSG might happen, again, assuming a ‘standing start’ in which shooters are not (visibly) disaggregated but acting in support of each other, using downrange linear separations as low-threat masking in commerical maritime traffic-
Understand: a Carrier is two NPPs, an MRT tanker and two Ammunition Ships rolled up into one 1,000ft TLE. You pop one, just one, Ammo-Detonates-Nuclear Plants and the entire region, for hundreds of miles downwind of the sinking site is going to be contaminated, for DECADES. Just like Chernobyl.
Civilian Maritime Traffic….1…2…3-4…Island……5…..6–8….Sand bar…
Saudi no longer bothers running the Shia gauntlet, they ship half their Ras Tanura product to Petro Rabigh on the West Coast (Red Sea). So as long as they don’t piss off the Houthi and/or get the Iranians to try a hand of Al Shabah vs. DF-21 Texas Hold’em, they’re good. Most of the other GCC states ship to Asia and Iran, as a BRICS wannabe and SCO member, doesn’t touch them.
The IRGC and the Persian Gulf Region in a Period of Contested Deterrence
Next it must be accepted that the Iranians likely have 1–2 nuclear weapons, purchased from foreign partners, as a Doomsday regime change inhibitor, to be used on friendly soil to ‘stop the crayon eaters’ from coming ashore. And will likely gain more, as U.S. threats to hold them responsible for their proxies attacks. Which are now begining induce IDFAF inspired raids on Iran itself. Iran has the conventional theater ballistic and drone+cruise missiles to absolutely shatter Israel. But cannot, for the moment, reach the Jericho TELs in the Zecharia Caves of Sdot Micha AB.
…………………………CSS-101/201 Mod Silkworm……………………………… 100km
………..MINES…………MINES………….MINES…………..Kilo Class Minelayer
Which crippled the Saudi Al Madinah Corvette-
Where narrowed marine shipping chokes equate to easy area denial options, Sea Control does not have to be by presence. It can be done via aggressive raiding, with low value hulls, supported by fast boat decoy as well as strike operations.
Al Madinah Attack Video
Thus, greatly challenging the ability of USN/USAF assets to hit targets without retaliatory engagement as IRGCN/IRIN assets effectively shut down PG traffic with both longrange mobile shore missiles, boat swarms and, as in the Iran/Iraq War, mines-
MINES……………<Goalkeeper CG…..<CVN…LHA……TAC <DDG……….……...1–10km
Ashoura
Cougar
And finally, though a separate service from the IRGCN militia force, if called to war, there would likely also be support from IRIN (National Navy) which would likely include multiple SSC hulls from the Safir Kish OPV to Houdong/Tondar, La Combatante/Sina and the new Al Madhi Corvettes-
About five minutes later, as the dedicated fire fighting crews tried to keep these ancient, oozing Comp-B explosive, weapons cool with a giant fire extinguisher, one of these bombs cooked off as it sat, burning in a river of jet fuel.
Another 10 jets on the aft end of the ship were peppered with shrapnel and a couple of those began to burn as well. There was a moment when we thought we were going to lose the flight deck. Half the on-hand candy stripers were down and, unlike WWII, we did not practice ‘Everyone is a Fire Fighter!’ so there was difficulty organizing secondary parties.
Yes, those these are not Katyusha (82–132mm rocket) or even Grad (122mm) as full length systems of relatively long range but rather a clone of a Chinese Type 63 (107mm), which, functionally, looks and performs more like a WWII pattern German Nebelwurfer.
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FAC-M………....FAC-M………..FAC-M…………FAC-M………FAC-M…….….40–60km
There are literally at least a dozen variations of hull form, weapons suite and stated mission. All seemingly with different names. Some, undoubtedly, with multiple designators, just to mess with monitoring.
You have to be a power drunk fool to bring a CSG into a littoral rain gutter like the Persian Gulf. Because you are asking to catch a ~7,000 KIA mazcat to the teeth. Yet there we routinely sit not just in the SOH but at Juffairare. As though Gunboat Diplomacy with 30 billion dollar asset was a thing.
……<DDG1……………<USCG OPC…………<DDG2………………<USCG OPC……..
Discovering which is which (sorting sheep from goats), amongst the flood of everyday ships that number *In The Hundreds* coming into and out of the Persian Gulf, is not going to be simple or obvious, Day-1, Round-1, in which the Iranians will likely attempt to gain the initiative with surprise strikes from multiple directions, based on boats hiding in the hull shadows of civilian traffic and/or anchored to small islands. The latter can be actual islands or small sandbars and the boats can be seen against them, with ISAR mapping, but only if you look with a dedicated APS-154 type system on a P-8A.
Peykaap/Zulfigar FAC-M
Ideally, the Iranians want all missile launches to come from so close that they stack. But this is a two way sword as any attempt to put boats to water, fuel and leave port by IRIN assets especially would draw a response by an MPA or Fighter with their own missiles as a ‘friendly visit’ and since the Iranians do not have effective Naval AAW capability, this forces the SSC’s to stay within Kordad-3 coastal SAM envelopes or, if they are feeling particularly suicidal, for the IRIAF to launch their own BARCAP to screen their ships. Either of which rapidly gets out escalated by the USN and local Air Forces, operating out of Doha, Al Udeid or Al Dhafra ABs.
CONCLUSION:
Now all remaining members of the battle group escort force are fully engaged with mixed AAW/ASUW/BMD threats as the Iranians hope the NIFC-CA breaks down due to the number of popup threats, at very short range, and possible initial damage to the SPY-1 systems from saturation rocket attacks. All ships are still operating on Link-4/11/21 targeting networks so there there is some redundancy.
They have the ability to bring multiple uranium centrifuge cascades to full operation which will lead to sufficient quantities of bomb level (92–94% purity) for simple gun weapons within 1–2 months, generating 6–10 weapons per year, in the 10–20KT range. This must be mentioned in light of the use of Shahid ‘Witness’ attacks on Saudi naval vessels like this one-
C-802 Attack On USN Ships, ‘Sans Aegis Weapons System’
BIMCO says it’s 10–40 ships carrying 20–30% of the global petroleum trade. But it has to be closer to 90 hulls.