More than 60% of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ fast attack ships in charge of patrolling the Strait of Hormuz are still intact despite six weeks of US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran’s navy, according to a new report.
While America has decimated Iran’s standard navy, sinking more than 155 vessels, the ships under the IRGC’s control are still largely operational and capable of policing the key water route President Trump has vowed to reopen, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The IRGC’s navy is vast, small, and speedy, allowing the attack vessels to evade satellite detection and hide in underground pens along the rocky coast of the 20-mile-wide strait, said Chris Long, a former British navy official in the Persian Gulf.
“It will be a long time before the US can take all those out,” Long told the WSJ.
The formation of the fleet was a direct result of the so-called Tanker War of the 1980s, when the US sank much of Iran’s active fleet in a single-day strike.
Since then, the Islamic Republic has pivoted to an asymmetrical navy, with the IRGC tasked with policing the Strait of Hormuz while Iran’s conventional navy patrols other waterways in the Gulf.
Iran previously showed off the speedy boats during live-fire military drills in February as a show of force against the US naval buildup in the Middle East prior to the start of the war.
The ships were shown to be armed with rocket launchers and able to lay mines in the strait, with the boats capable of moving at high speeds as they moved in and out of their underground pens.
The strategy appears to have paid off for Tehran, given the IRGC’s survival rate compared with that of the conventional navy, which US officials touted as completely destroyed in the first three weeks of the war.
The IRGC’s navy, meanwhile, has been able to effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz with underwater mines and drone attacks, pausing a key trade route that oversees the transport of 20% of the world’s oil supply.
At least 50 attacks have been launched against shipping vessels in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz since the war began, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data conflict tracker.
“Their asymmetrical strategy is working,” David Des Roches, a former director responsible for Persian Gulf policy at the Defense Department, told the WSJ.
Trump said Sunday that the US and it allies would be deploying minesweeping ships and destroyers to open up the Strait of Hormuz to the more than 2,000 ships stuck in the Gulf.
