Not just damaging oil production infrastructure, but making the Persian Gulf unusable for tanker traffic would be disastrous for most of the world’s economy.
Iran is in a better situation to weather such an economic armageddon thanks to dealing with sanctions for years. Except for one thing: food. They need to import a lot of food which they aren’t going to get in sufficient quantities even from their friends in Russia and China. And once people get hungry, they get mad and the internal situation in Iran will go to pot.
Smart people will do everything they can do avoid such a situation. Unfortunately, too many countries are run by very non-smart people.
The US war games simulations pre-Iraq war showed that the Iraqis could win against the US Navy using the lots of small stuff strategy (and reliable leadership). And that’s with barely a coastline. Iran knows what it’s doing in this regard.
Not sure they could make it unusable. But they could certainly have a big initial impact on trade through the region, though not sure how long they could sustain it. I seriously doubt it would be more than a few weeks. And I doubt that, if they tried, it would be just the US responding. Hell, China would be fairly unhappy with that state of affairs too, as it would affect their imports too.
I disagree with this part. I think they are pretty close the the edge, right now, economically. And this is before a single bomb or missile has been fired. While it’s true they could and would hurt the worlds economy, an actual shooting war would be the end for them. It’s kind of North Korea all over again. The population is restless, their economy is in shambles, and their infrastructure is creaky. Iran is in much better shape than North Korea, but not enough that if there were systemic, or even just limited attacks on their own infrastructure it’s going to push them over the edge pretty quickly.
Absolutely agree with the first part of this. It’s a lose/lose for everyone. Some would lose a lot more than others, but basically there wouldn’t be any winners from a national perspective, IMHO. The SMART thing would have been for the US to continue with the nuclear deal and then use other means to pressure Iran to stop being a bad actor, instead of push them to the brink and into a corner, which is what we’ve done.
AFAIK, the USN has put a lot of effort into devising countermeasures against small boat type navies; that’s basically what the littoral combat ships are designed to fight, with 57 mm guns and navalized Hellfire missiles.
Kind of like a modern-day torpedo boat destroyer, now that “destroyers” are more what cruisers used to be…
But that’s the point of asymmetric warfare. The Iranian Navy isn’t designed to take on the US Navy head on, or even obliquely. The point of it is for them to be able to strike at softer targets and MAYBE hurt the US or at least make them wary enough to move their ships back from the region an into blue waters to the south. But really, it’s to strike at trade shipping while they can and do as much damage as they can before they are swimming with the fishies, and for THAT mission their navy is able to do the mission, especially coupled with their missiles and other stand off weapons. They aren’t going to stand up to a full on US assault for more than a few weeks, but in that time they can and will do some serious damage.
They might think that the regime would still survive, as invasion really isn’t an option for the US. I’m not sure that’s a good calculation, but it might be. But for all the pain they suffer, they will certainly have others feeling the pain as well, as a lot of trade goes through the area where they can affect, so in the short term the global economy would certainly take it in the shorts. And this leaves aside attacks such as the one they did on Saudi’s oil fields, which I’m pretty sure we’d see a lot more of before they finally go down.
I’m not disagreeing; their plan seems to be to use these little boats to pester and damage tankers and commercial shipping, not to somehow go fight the USN or any other blue-water navies, despite whatever amateurish Youtube videos they may produce showing them shooting at aircraft carrier mockups.
It’s probably the second most absurd Iranian military thing I’ve ever seen; back in high school, the public access cable station used to occasionally run some kind of Iranian military videos- it was always goofy-marching soldiers, training film footage/Iran-Iraq war early footage, and all set to the “Superman” theme.
Some possibly related points: I think the Ghawar water cut has been rising, and the Saudis are struggling to keep production afloat due to peak oil. Meanwhile, U.S. unconventional production may soon peak due to rising debts coupled with high depletion rates.
Meanwhile, Iran had been trying to move away from the petrodollar through its own oil bourse, with similar movies leading to destabilization for Iraq, Libya, and others.
Finally, Trump appears to be reluctant to engage in neo-conservatism to keep the petrodollar propped up but others likely disagree with him.
Too big, it seems: Houthi PR may have gotten way ahead of Houthi accomplishments on the battlefield - they’re releasing a few hundred prisoners, but only a couple score Saudi prisoners - it is perhaps wise to be wary of the Houthi claims regarding this fighting.
It was a pretty gigantic claim. Three brigades is a large division. They were implying a victory on the scale of the Iraqi Hammurabi Armored Division essentially evaporating during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Saudis are so bad at ground combat, it wasn’t something that could be instantly thought of as bogus.
OTOH, had something like that actually happened, it would feel like shades of 1979 in Iran.
That would be interesting. I think the Saudi/Iranian thing has a lot less to do with the Sunni/Shi’a split than most Americans think and a lot more to do with the Revolution/Monarchy split, but that’s just the opinion of a guy who doesn’t know a lot about the Middle East, but has read a lot about the European revolutions of 1798 and 1848.
That Saudi monarchy probably isn’t going to last forever, and the US might need to think about that…
Wonder how much that wooden mock-up cost?