Countering Iran's Menacing Persian Gulf Navy

The United States is warning the Iranians not to provoke a conflict in the Persian Gulf. U.S. officials are preoccupied by the threat posed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, which controls a large fleet of speedboats that could harass shipping in the Gulf:

The secret communications channel was chosen to underscore privately to Iran the depth of American concern about rising tensions over the strait, where American naval officials say their biggest fear is that an overzealous Revolutionary Guards naval captain could do something provocative on his own, setting off a larger crisis.
"If you ask me what keeps me awake at night, it's the Strait of Hormuz and the business going on in the Arabian Gulf," Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, the chief of naval operations, said in Washington this week.

I wrote about the Revolutionary Guard Navy threat last October in my Bloomberg View column; here's an excerpt:

This February (2011), a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion surveillance plane, on routine patrol over the Persian Gulf, drew some unwelcome attention. An Iranian aircraft made such a close pass that the American pilots reported that they could see the faces of their Iranian adversaries. The Pentagon was quickly notified of the near- collision.

Two months later, the British warship HMS Iron Duke, patrolling the waters off Bahrain, was suddenly challenged by an approaching speedboat. Every sailor in every Western navy is acquainted with the al-Qaeda suicide-boat attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, in which 17 Americans were killed, so the Iron Duke's crew was quickly ordered to fire warning shots to the side of the speedboat. The two men in the approaching craft took the suggestion to heart, and sped away. The identities of the men are unknown, but some British and U.S. officials reached the highly plausible conclusion that they were part of the growing navy of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Yes, the Revolutionary Guards have their own navy -- a bigger one, in fact, than Iran's traditional navy. (The traditional navy has 18,000 sailors; the IRGC's navy reportedly has 20,000 personnel, as well as a large fleet suitable for waging the sort of asymmetric warfare it favors.) And the guards -- protectors of Ayatollah Khomeini's dystopian vision for a radicalized Muslim world, enthusiastic exporters of terrorism, and rulers of a state within a state -- are becoming ever more aggressive in the Gulf.

This year has seen a spike in such encounters. Western ships in the Gulf are now regularly shadowed by the smaller crafts of the Iranians. When U.S. strategists make lists of the many challenges posed by Iran, the capabilities of the IRGCN, as it is known, quickly rise to the top. The Gulf, of course, is indispensable to the smooth flow of energy resources (in 2009, more than 15 percent of oil traded worldwide moved through the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint between the Gulf and the Arabian Sea), and the Iranians are well aware of their ability to strangle the global economy.

Only Iran's nuclear program -- the one its leaders claim is entirely peaceful in nature even as they develop the technology to make triggers for nuclear weapons -- is a greater preoccupation.