I would be surprised if a small number of these transfers weren’t to unmanned underwater vehicles meant to demonstrate the capacity to run blockades with logistics using UUVs.
I would be surprised if a small number of these transfers weren’t to unmanned underwater vehicles meant to demonstrate the capacity to run blockades with logistics using UUVs.
Or, and hear me out: Big hose.
Immune to sea mines, easily buried, doesn’t rely on a fleet of hundreds of small, easily identified vessels full of pressurized hydrocarbons that you will be continuously hooking and unhooking from tankers on either end of the strait, where Iran could clearly see what you’re doing and just like… put out a couple nets.
(also no. No, Big Hose is not trivially easy to cut. It is in fact very difficult to do that.)
A hose would be THE MOST vulnerable solution possible what?
Also Iran can’t see into the ocean, in this war the US navy owns the ocean beneath the surface wholly and entirely, there is no reliable way for Iran to locate or hit subsurface vessels in the strait other than spamming mines which if anything unmanned vehicles are already the safer solution to use in mined areas.
If the US is not doing this it is entirely because of incompetence, which is admittedly very possible for this administration.
For one, I am SURE this is one of the first strategies Ukraine suggested to Gulf powers they entered into security agreements with, it is the logical extension of unmanned vehicles to wartime logistics in a naval context.
No, it’s trivially easy for them to do that. That’s why we can’t have Big Hose.
With what tools can they see beneath the surface into the ocean?
Not to detect a hose or structure but a moving transient thing?
My goodness, what a good point. Looks like Big Hose is back on the menu, boys.
Answer my question, what the hell gives Iran the capacity to go toe to toe in the sonar/signals intelligence arena subsurface with a navy like the US Navy?
Absolutely nothing! It’s an excellent point.
Look I could keep this up as this kind of thing is basically my catnip, but to explain further why Big Hose, submarine cables/pipelines are buried. And also LNG is 1/2 the density of water. (Large tanks of LNG will float, which makes them very fun in floods if they get ripped off their mounts!)
Russia is already fairly adept at the sabotage of static marine infrastructure, burial helps, but 5 meters max is only a deterrant which underlines how an asymmetric naval power can manage to threaten static marine infrastructure even when wildly outmatched and under surveillance.
This fascinating technology that will certainly help however! Thank you for sharing this thing looks cool af.
When the target becomes a moving, transient subsurface vessel however, that ability of an asymmetric naval power being able to reach out and reliably apply force vanishes. The option is still there to spam mines but that isn’t any more effective against UUVs than it is surface vessels, if anything it is less effective.
Oh good grief. Yes, sure, they and china have done plenty to sabotage marine cables. Civilian cable, however, is not generally guarded. The solution to someone dragging an anchor between Sweden and Lithuania is international sanctions; the solution to someone doing it between Qeshm and Ash Sha’m is to blow the ship up. With missiles. Just… the idea that hundreds of large moving vessels would be harder to find than a Big Hose buried at the bottom of the sea is just. Really, really wrong.
Additionally, you would need more submarines than currently exist to make this even slightly viable just to make up the difference for the US’s import thru the straight. And not only is the US *the world’s largest producer of LNG, the amount of LNG it imports through the straight per year is approximately Three Santiago’s worth. Which is both practically nothing in scale, and would require 30,000 round trips, or 82 6-hour round trips every day.
For context, china would need… uh… Napkin math says, using the largest Narco sub ever recorded (which was only semi-submersible) it would take 22 THOUSAND 6 hour trips per day.
Seriously, this is dumb. Even Big Hose is dumb. Having a whole bunch of unmaned submersible SCVs running your vespene through a sea-mine infested strait is a ridiculously unworkable idea. Why would anyone even want to do this? If you can field that many UUVs, surely you could just build a regular pipeline instead of all this Wile E Coyote nonsense.