Looks Like Commerce Raiding is Back on the Menu

a great day at sea doing great things

Since the first man from Tribe-A returning from harvesting figs from the big tree on the other side of the river heard a zing of an arrow zipping by his head, fired from a canoe belonging to Tribe-B, a guaranteed part of conflict between two groups with access to waterborne trade has been this: commerce raiding.

Every naval power should have this concept in the mix of its fleet design, especially if your rivals depend on the seas for a significant portion of their food and raw materials.

It isn’t a mission beneath a navy. It isn’t a lower form of naval war. No. Indeed, when practiced properly, it is a war-winning form of war at sea.

It would require super-human strength not to start this week with a topic we touched on at ~the 7-minute mark on yesterday’s Midrats Podcast.

We’re back, in a fashion, in the game.

I guess we might as well let the CINC describe his fleet’s action:

For more details, let’s head over to CENTCOM:

Guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance (DDG 111) intercepted M/V Touska as it transited the north Arabian Sea at 17 knots enroute to Bandar Abbas, Iran. American forces issued multiple warnings and informed the Iranian-flagged vessel it was in violation of the U.S. blockade.

After Touska’s crew failed to comply with repeated warnings over a six-hour period, Spruance directed the vessel to evacuate its engine room. Spruance disabled Touska’s propulsion by firing several rounds from the destroyer’s 5-inch MK 45 Gun into Touska’s engine room. U.S. Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit later boarded the non-compliant vessel, which remains in U.S. custody.

SWO’ners all around.

It does bring up some interesting questions:

• I assume from a weaponeering POV that to disable the engine room with minimum risk of the loss of human life or loss of the ship, we’d use an inert Blind Loaded & Plugged (BL&P) shells?

• The Marines were not on the Spruance, but came from another ship?

• It was determined that the Spruance’s VBSS team was not adequate for this mission?

  • If this is true, then how do we upgrade training to ensure they are?

  • If we won’t upgrade them, is it time to make Marine Detachments on ships great again?

• If we are going to start taking out the engineering plants of the ships in service to hostile nations, it sure would be a good idea to convert some or all of our remaining Fleet Ocean Tugs from USNS to USS and man them with Sailors and not mariners. I also think recent events justify making them armed again as well, in a modern capability relative to the Abnaki-class ATFs of lore. Everything forward needs to be armed when any goober with a garage can launch an attack drone.

…and of course, the #1 takeaway from this is another demonstration of one of the most frequent Salamander of the Copybook Headings:

There is no weapon system on a warship so essential, useful, and valuable than its main gun mount

Is this a one-off? Will we limit this to just those ships about to break the blockade? Is there a branch plan to expand to a global commerce raiding campaign against Iranian shipping?

As Ray Powell pointed out, the Tousca was a dedicated ship in the modern China Trade.

Is it morphing into something more than my preferred “punitive expedition”—or is it the logical extension of it?

I can argue both sides, but one thing that can’t be argued is that this is something unprecedented.

In Ephrat Livni’s article in the NYT over the weekend, there was an attempt,

Under international law, the legality of the blockade is “more ambiguous,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank in Washington.

For a blockade to be legal, Ms. Kavanagh said, it must be “effective,” meaning that it is both enforceable and enforced. Some would argue that a “‘global blockade’ is not permissible in conception” because it is overly broad, she said.

Who are these “some” people, and who, if anyone, taught them world history?

Jennifer and her friends at Defense Priorities are … on a small little island on this.

In the same article, a couple of Midrats Podcast alumni are throwing water on some of the overly excitable takes about the blockade.

“War is a messy thing not just on the combat side but under national and international law,” said James R. Holmes, chair of maritime strategy at the Naval War College.

“From a legal standpoint, a blockade is an act of war, so the blockade probably is legal to the extent Operation Epic Fury is,” he said using the name of the U.S. military campaign against Iran.

Since Congress has not declared war against Iran, no formal state of war exists between the United States and the Islamic Republic. But Mr. Holmes noted that “undeclared wars are more the rule than the exception in U.S. history,”

…

“The blockade is a wartime extension of existing U.S. economic sanctions against the Iranian regime,” said James Kraska, professor of international maritime law and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. In peacetime, he said, the sanctions were a “powerful tool to weaken the Iranian economy.” Now, he said, the blockade serves as a “kinetic expansion.”

I stand with the two James.

At the end of the day, BZ to the crew of the Spruance and the Marines who showed up to seize the ship. Good work when you can get it.

h/t to another Midrats regular, John Kuehn.