Warships? What Warships?
As the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continues, President Trump has said that U.S. warships will escort tankers through. What warships? Warships have to be able to take hits and keep on fighting. The U.S. Navy’s surface warships, cruisers and destroyers, can’t.
A front-page article in the March 12 Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. has turned down repeated requests for tanker escorts from oil companies, officials from Gulf countries said. Defense officials said it is too risky to send warships into the confined waters of the strait until the risks of Iranian fire have receded.
When speaking of today’s “warships,” not just American vessels, those defense officials are correct. In the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, we sent U.S. Navy frigates to escort tankers. The tankers ended up escorting the “warships,” because the tankers could take missile hits and keep going and the frigates could not.
Yet every maritime power keeps building these types of ships, ships that are useful only for naval revues. Why? Because admirals and captains want ships that look like “greyhounds of the sea,” traditional surface warships. That demand restricts navies to ships that carry no armor but are stuffed with electronics, electronics on which the ships’ weapons depend. One hit may not sink such a ship, but it is likely to get a “mission kill,” where the ship cannot fight again until it goes into dockyard for repairs. If I am trying to close a strait and the “warship” is trying to open it, that counts as a win.
As I have argued since the mid-1980s in the book I co-authored with Senator Gary Hart, America Can Win! The Case for Military Reform, a modern warship is a merchant ship in its hull and propulsion plant, in most cases a containership. That means it is far larger in tonnage than a cruiser or destroyer, perhaps ten times as large. In peacetime, it is in merchant service, with a naval reserve crew—something that would re-build the disappearing American merchant marine. On mobilization, it would be converted into a warship by putting on containerized weapons and sensors, while the hull would be filled with something fireproof that floats. Such ships would have as much offensive capability as today’s faux warships, or more, but could take multiple hits while continuing to fight. The technology is there: the German shipyard Blohm & Voss has offered its MEKO warships with containerized weapons and sensors for decades.
Meanwhile, as our “warships” wait for the Strait of Hormuz to be made safe for them, Iran remains in the stronger strategic position. It is much easier to close a strait to merchant traffic than to open one, and every day the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf stay closed, the world economy gets shakier. At present, time is on Iran’s side.
Once again we see America do what has cost it so many lost wars. Washington, including both the Pentagon and the White House, thinks it can win strategically simply by piling up tactical victories. Yes, we are masters of Iran’s skies and we have blown up many targets. But getting to strategic victory requires more than putting firepower on targets, the reductio ad absurdum to which Second Generation warfare inevitably leads.
President Trump has already destroyed himself politically by promising his base we would start no more avoidable foreign wars, wars waged for the interests of someone else, and then ignoring his promise and starting a war. America’s only interest in the Persian Gulf is making sure the oil flows out safely, which it was doing on February 27 but now doesn’t. If Iran wins this war by showing it can keep the oil flow blocked against our best efforts, you can count on enough Republican as well as Democratic votes in Congress to impeach, convict and remove Mr. Trump from office.