Praveen Swami
Like a sea predator from medieval tales, the Sablan would emerge from the darkness, cutting off the bows of merchant ships headed for Kuwait. The crew knew what would come next. The imposing frigate, built at Britain’s Vickers shipyards, would bare its fangs, and rake the crew quarters with fire from its 35 millimetre Oerlikon machine guns. Then, as the frigate sailed away from the burning ship, there was a dark message from the Iranian warship’s captain, Abdollah Manavi: “Have a nice day.”
This week, in response to anti-shipping missile attacks on merchant ships transiting the Red Sea—the latest in the list of the Panamanian-flagged MSC Clara and the Norwegian-owned Swan Atlantic—the United States has despatched a multinational fleet to protect commercial traffic headed into the Suez Canal against attack.
Large container operators are already pulling their ships out of Red Sea’s crowded lanes, and asking them to transit around the tip of Africa instead.
The multinational fleet is meant to show that insurgents can’t shut down the world’s maritime trade lanes. Even though Houthi commanders are threatening to turn the Red Sea into the multinational force’s grave, the language probably shouldn’t be taken seriously. The Houthi missile threat, though, should. The insurgent movement has used its drones and ballistic missiles to successfully target infrastructure, military bases and even well-defended oil refineries like Abqaiq and Khurais.
Even though Houthi prose is painted in Palestinian commanders, their objectives in this conflict are fundamentally political.
Houthi missiles pose a marginal threat to Israel. The Houthis are, however, locked in secret talks with Saudi Arabia—and want to show the world they can ignite brush fires across a volatile region if their demands for control of Yemen are not met.
From the Battle of the Tankers, which raged between Iraq and Iran from 1980-1988—and eventually drew in the United States Navy—strategists should be prepared for a long, and bloody, struggle.
The Tanker War
Early in the summer of 1984, the small Libyan cargo ship Ghat began its journey to the Eritrean port of Assab, filled with a cargo of crated goods, food—and state-of-the-art Soviet Union-made acoustic mines, capable of detonating when they detected the sound of a ship’s propellers. The crew rolled the mines off the back of the Ghat once they had crossed Suez, historian David Crist has recorded, and then quietly back home. Inside weeks, shipping was hitting mines—the explosions too loud not to be heard by the international workers. Faced with this new threat to global shipping, the United States moved in minesweeping helicopters, but the work was painfully slow: The Suez canal was littered with decades of debris, and every abandoned oil drum was a potential mine. King Fahd Bin Abdulrehman of Saudi Arabia chose this particular time to make a fortnight’s yacht trip, and had to be escorted by American helicopters.
Iran learned the right lessons from Libya’s revenge for its global isolation and sanctions.
The Iraqi dictator had gone to war against the country in 1981, expecting its revolutionary government to collapse. Instead, his army faced stalemates and reverses. To break the deadlock, Iraq began bombing Iranian shipping in the northern Persian Gulf. Atlas 1, a Turkish oil tanker loading Iranian oil at Kharg Island, became the first international ship caught up in these attacks.
The effort to choke Iranian shipping, military expert Anthony Cordesman has noted, largely failed. Iran moved its oil transshipment hub to Kharg island, and used its own tankers to make the most dangerous part of the journey to Basra. Iranians knew the attacks were intended to force them into attempting a blockade of the Straits of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s energy passed.
That would invite international intervention, and Tehran was determined not to walk into the trap.
From 1984, though, Iraq acquired combat aircraft with longer ranges, capable of delivering lethal Exocet missiles. Losses surged. Iran, which had not carried out a single attack on international shipping from 1981 to 1983, knew it had to strike back.
An inevitable escalation
Advances made in Iran’s naval capabilities shaped its response. The country’s Navy, trained and equipped by the West, centred around its four British-made Frigates. By 1986, though, the country had begun producing large numbers of anti-ship mines, derived from North Korean and Soviet models.
The mines are believed to have been laid around Kuwait—the shipping hub for Iraqi oil—by vessels camouflaged as trading Dhows. Iran also developed fast attack boats, to stage hit-and-run raids on merchant shipping.
The escalation served its purpose. Kuwait desperately pleaded with both superpowers for support, and the United States considered re-flagging the kingdom’s ships and sailing them under military escort.
Even as escort plans were discussed, though, an Iraqi combat jet accidentally hit one of the ships brought in for convoy duties with an Exocet missile.
Thirty-seven sailors were killed. Scholar Norman Friedman notes that the crew aboard the stark were aware of the threat from the Iraqi combat jet, but hesitated to retaliate due to restrictive rules of engagement that permitted force only in self-defence.
To make things worse, the first protected convoy saw the re-flagged Rekkah—now named the Bridgeton—struck by a mine.
The mine did little damage to the giant cargo ship, but the spectacle of the vessel limping into port—with two of its escorts using it as a shield—proved a public relations disaster. Further investigations, scholar Stephen Pelletier writes, led to revelations that the United States had no usable minesweepers to guard against Iran’s mines.
The bloody climax
Lessons learned in the early months of the United States operations led to a dramatic expansion in its fleet and capabilities. Following the severe damage to the Frigate Samuel B Roberts in 1988, the United States escalated the tempo of its counter-attacks, damaging the Salaban and sinking its sister ship, the Salahan. The United States also sank and damaged a number of small Iranian attack craft. Even though Iran’s smaller navy had put up stiff resistance, its losses were unsustainable.
The real damage to Iran, though, was being inflicted elsewhere. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s technical support allowed Iraq to improve its targeting of Iran’s military, and plug gaps in its own defences.
The savage bombardment of cities by both countries, moreover, led to growing pressure on Tehran’s theocratic regime to end the fighting.
Like the Iranians, the Houthis have shown ingenuity in pursuing irregular warfare by sea. Even before the Israeli-linked cargo ship Galaxy Leader last month, the Houthis had shown skill in using islands they control to target shipping in the Red Sea. The United Arab Emirates-flagged Rawabi, for example, was held from January to April last year, and only released after the payment of a multi-million dollar ransom. The Houthis, unlike Iran, have few cities or conventional military infrastructure to defend, giving them resilience in the face of international pressure.
The consequences of a crisis in the Red Sea won’t, likely, be catastrophic.
Even though eight days are added to a Shanghai-Rotterdam trip by large container ships having to round the south of Africa, they can avoid heavy transit fees levied by Egypt. Ten percent of the global oil trade is estimated to currently transit through Suez, a significant but not catastrophic part. The Houthis have shown they have the capacity to harry and disrupt oil production and shipping, but not to significantly degrade it.
For the West, though, the crisis in the Red Sea holds out an important lesson:
Efforts to keep the Israel-Palestinian crisis contained to Gaza are unlikely to succeed, as other movements and forces opportunistically feed off the opportunities it gives them.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor. Views are personal.
