Terrible Rules of Engagement Put US Warships at Increased Risk

A locator map for the Persian Gulf and its surrounding countries. (AP Photo)

Commentary

The most recent mock attack and harassment of U.S. warships had them being swarmed by dozens of Iranian drones and speedboats as they transited the Strait of Hormuz. This highlights just how vulnerable U.S. ships are while operating in Iran’s backyard, even as tensions rise over U.S. seizures of Iranian ships and Iran retaliates by seizing ships.

Shockingly, as reported by the UK Express, the swarming Iranian attack speedboats were allowed to come within inches of two U.S. warships as Iranian drones flew directly overhead filming the encounter. This encounter and many previous ones, such as the June 20, 2022, encounter in which an Iranian attack boat was allowed to come within 50 yards of the USS Choctaw County, raises the question of just what the rules of engagement (ROEs) under which U.S. Navy captains are being forced to operate are.

This very important question needs to be answered. Under international maritime law, U.S. warships have the right to take actions necessary to protect themselves from imminent threats. This right includes having the right to scale the response to deal with the level of threat. But for some reason, the captains of the U.S. Navy’s Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Bataan and the USS Carter Hall, a docking ship, let hostile forces get within easy attack range of their vessels. Also in the area was the USS Thomas Hudner, an Arleigh Burke destroyer that should have been providing defense. If reports are to be believed, the U.S. Navy ships didn’t exercise their right of self-defense but instead relied on the restraint of the Iranian government and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps crewing the attack boats, who have something of a reputation for fanaticism and viewing the United States as “the Great Satan.”

If the harassment exercise had actually been an attack, the Navy ships could have been seriously damaged or even sunk. While the fast attack boats attacking the much larger Navy vessels are hundreds of times smaller, they can mount rocket launchers capable of doing considerable damage. But a far bigger threat comes from having these fast attack boats becoming guided bombs, remotely controlled or otherwise, packed with many hundreds of pounds of high explosives capable of ripping massive holes in the thin, unarmored hulls of U.S. warships—holes large enough to put the ships at risk of sinking.

Allowing Iran free rein to regularly come close enough to our ships to guarantee successful attacks sets a terrible precedent and increases the chances that such an attack will occur. On the other hand, making it clear to Iran that our Navy ship captains will be operating under ROEs that allow them to defend security zones sufficiently sized to give them a good chance of defending themselves reduces the chances of a successful attack by Iran and thereby reduces Iran’s temptation to attempt one.

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Along with putting more effective ROEs into place, it‘ll also be extremely important to let U.S. Navy ship commanders know that U.S. civilian and military leaders will have their backs and won’t be Monday morning quarterbacking with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. They need to know that they’ll be given every possible benefit of the doubt after they make a decision to use lethal force to defend their ships.

But even if U.S. Navy captains are given the freedom to defend their ships, doing so is much harder than talking about it, especially when transiting the Strait of Hormuz, which narrows to 21 miles at one point and has territorial waters that are dominated by Iran or Oman. Iran also controls seven out of the eight islands located in the Strait of Hormuz. And even the Persian Gulf, being only 210 miles at its widest, is relatively confining. So this is a particularly tough area for any Navy having to deal with a hostile foreign power such as Iran.

And then you add in the unfortunate fact that our large Navy ships aren’t knife fighters but instead were mainly designed for long-range combat and anti-submarine warfare. Ideally, the U.S. Navy wants to see the enemy’s ships first, and then fire missiles at them from many miles away. Engagements at close range with a lot of small opponents, including countless cheap suicide drones and very fast attack boats, aren’t the forte of our big expensive Navy ships. This highlights our Navy’s ongoing failure to build the smaller warships we so desperately need to operate effectively in the littoral and green waters—ships that would be ideal for screening our large surface combatants and protecting civilian ships from being seized by Iran.

However, a lack of screening vessels doesn’t prevent the United States from having ROEs in place that maximize our ships’ chances of successfully defending themselves using the weapon systems at their disposal. And these new ROEs should be rolled out ASAP as rising tensions with Iran, China, and Russia make attacking U.S. warships ever more tempting for Iran.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.