Superfast vessel could be used as weapon against ships in Persian Gulf, intelligence sources say

By Paul Koring

Source:

April 5, 2010

Washington — From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Apr. 05, 2010 9:45PM EDT Last updated on Monday, Apr. 05, 2010 9:53PM EDT

Iran has outwitted U.S. and British efforts to keep it from acquiring a superfast powerboat that could be loaded with high explosives and used in a suicidal attack against one of the huge U.S. aircraft carriers deployed to the Persian Gulf.

Unidentified intelligence sources quoted in published reports say Tehran’s Islamic regime managed to acquire the Bradstone Challenger, a 15-metre-long craft designed especially for sustained high speeds, early last year.

While naval analysts differ over whether a serious threat exists from so-called swarm attacks by such fast small boats against larger, less-manoeuvrable warships, fears that the rulers in Tehran wanted to use the high-tech Bradstone Challenger – which averaged nearly 100 kilometres an hour in a record-breaking 27-hour circumnavigation of Britain – as a weapon prompted both Washington and London to try to block any sale.

Failed interception

According to a Financial Times report, U.S. Special Forces were poised in January of 2009 to seize the Iranian freighter carrying the superfast U.S.-built speedboat from South Africa to Iran but the operation was called off. On the day President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the U.S. government issued an emergency order banning the secretive sale through intermediaries that would send the Challenger to Iran’s navy. Iran’s “navy has been involved in enhancing its asymmetric naval warfare capabilities [which] include exploiting enemy vulnerabilities through the use of ‘swarming’ tactics by well-armed small boats and fast-attack craft,” the U.S. government said in its order banning the sale, adding it has “a significant concern that the vessel will be utilized by [Iran] as a fast attack craft.’’

Small-boat navy

With most of its larger naval vessels rendered obsolete by decades of sanctions, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have long used small, fast patrol boats as an alternative. During the 1980s, they were used to attack Iraqi and Kuwaiti tankers and groups of fast launches have staged harassing swarms on U.S. warships in the Gulf on several occasions. Given Iran’s long-standing interest in very fast, small patrol boats (it has more than 1,000, including some based on designs imported from or copied from Korean, Chinese, Swedish and Italian craft) the effort to acquire the Challenger may also reflect a desire to reverse-engineer the vessel to build its own.

Bigger is better

Small-boat attacks on modern warships face long odds. The Tamil Tigers attacked cargo vessels with explosives-laden launches with some success. Against Sri Lankan warships they rarely succeeded. In 1991, after Iraq invaded Kuwait and a U.S.-led coalition attacked Iraq, a Canadian CF-18 warplane joined U.S. aircraft in destroying a flotilla of small Iraqi patrol vessels. Automatic, radar-controlled Gatling guns designed to destroy incoming sea-skimming missiles travelling hundreds of kilometres an hour would face no difficulty engaging even the fastest patrol boat. Helicopters firing heat-seeking or radar-guided missiles have been used to defend warships against small-boat attacks and the U.S. and other navies practise against such attacks routinely.

Remember the USS Cole

“Surprise aside (à la the USS Cole), the small boat ‘record’ since World War II fails to live up to modern-day hype,” Craig Hooper, a San Francisco-based national security strategist and specialist in coastal naval warfare, wrote on his blog in the wake of the news about Iran’s efforts to get the Challenger. “Certainly, small boats are not things to ignore, but I have serious doubts about the risk a small boat swarm poses to a prepared U.S. warship.” The USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, was crippled and nearly sunk while at anchor in Aden, Yemen, in 2000, when al-Qaeda suicide bombers in a slow-moving skiff crammed with explosives ran it into the side of the warship.