Center for a New American Security

What a sick, twisted world it is in which Abu Muqawama lives when a war game can be considered "legendary." But that's what the 2002 war game -- in which Lt.Gen. Paul K. Van Riper soundly defeated the U.S. Navy "Blue Force" in a virtual Persian Gulf -- is considered to be in unconventional warfare circles. The New York Times has a nice article on the war game in today's newspaper:

WASHINGTON — There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships.

In the days since the encounter with five Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, American officers have acknowledged that they have been studying anew the lessons from a startling simulation conducted in August 2002. In that war game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats.

“The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack,” said Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in the war game as commander of a Red Team force representing an unnamed Persian Gulf military. “The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes.”

The good news about all this is that Lt.Gen. Van Riper does not actually command the Iranian Navy. As far as we know. Who knows what he's doing in retirement, actually, and Iranian Lord of the Seas might be a good gig.

Whereas what we have here? A bunch of fig-eaters wearing towels on their heads, trying to find reverse in a Soviet tank. This is not a worthy adversary. - Walter Sobchak

One of Abu Muqawama's favorite defense correspondents gleefully passed along Ralph Peters's latest op-ed for the New York Post on this past weekend's showdown in the Strait of Hormuz between Iranian and U.S. Navy vessels. Pay close attention to the way in which the increasingly unstable but highly amusing Peters describes the Iranians:

Sunday's incident wasn't a one-off event improvised by the local yokels after a long Saturday night at the hookah bar. ... And it wasn't just some madrassa dropout with salt spray on his glasses scribbling notes on the lead Iranian boat.

Is it just us, or is Ralph Peters channeling Walter from the Big Lebowski?

Come to think of it, has anyone ever seen the two of them in the same place? Are they one and the same, perhaps?

Just remember, Ralph: keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic, you know, within the city - that ain't legal either.

Five Iranian speedboats harassed three US navy ships at the weekend, approaching them and radioing a threat to blow them up, US officials say.

The incident happened as the US vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz, which separates the Arabian peninsula and Iran, Pentagon officials said.

US sailors came close to opening fire, unnamed officials told CNN.

The White House on Monday warned Iran against "provocative actions that could lead to a dangerous incident".

Abu Muqawama walked into a coffee shop this morning and saw Barbara Starr on the television explaining this weekend's nonsense about Iranian naval vessels threatening U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz.* There is going to be a lot said about what this "means" and the way in which Iran is flexing its muscles in what it considers to be an "Iranian Lake" (rather than an international waterway). But we don't do strategy here at Abu Muqawama, preferring as we do to focus on tactics. So this would be a good time, then, to provide a link to this piece by Fariborz Haghshenass on Iranian naval tactics. Haghshenass is the nom de plume of a former Iranian military officer who often writes on Iranian military capabilities.** This "explainer" piece is a good one:

Iranian naval swarming tactics focus on surprising and isolating the enemy’s forces and preventing their reinforcement or resupply, thereby shattering the enemy’s morale and will to fight. Iran has practiced both mass and dispersed swarming tactics. The former employs mass formations of hundreds of lightly armed and agile small boats that set off from different bases, then converge from different directions to attack a target or group of targets. The latter uses a small number of highly agile missile or torpedo attack craft that set off on their own, from geographically dispersed and concealed locations, and then converge to attack a single target or set of targets (such as a tanker convoy). The dispersed swarming tactic is much more difficult to detect and repel because the attacker never operates in mass formations.

...

In wartime, Iranian naval forces would seek to close the Strait of Hormuz and destroy enemy forces bottled up in the Persian Gulf; therefore speed and surprise would be key. Iranian naval forces would seek to identify and attack the enemy’s centers of gravity as quickly as possible and inflict maximum losses before contact with subordinate units were lost as a result of enemy counterattacks. Geography is Iran’s ally. Because of the proximity of major shipping routes to the country’s largely mountainous 2,000-kilometer coastline, Iranian naval elements can sortie from their bases and attack enemy ships with little advance warning. Meanwhile, shore-based antiship missiles can engage targets almost anywhere in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. To achieve the latter capability, and to improve the survivability of its shore-based missile force, Iran has devoted significant efforts to extending the range of locally produced variants of a number of Chinese shore-based antiship missiles such as the HY-2 Silkworm and the C-802 (from 50 to 300 kilometers and from 120 to 170 kilometers, respectively). It has also introduced the use of helicopter-borne long-range antiship missiles.

To ensure that it can achieve surprise in the event of a crisis or war, Iran’s naval forces keep U.S. warships in the region under close visual, acoustic, and radar observation. The Iranian navy commander—Rear Adm. Sajad Kouchaki, one of the architects of the country’s naval doctrine—recently claimed that Iranian submarines continually monitor U.S. naval movements, frequently at close range, and have even passed underneath American aircraft carriers and other warships undetected. Iranian UAVs also frequently shadow U.S. carrier battle groups in the area.

*Abu Muqawama is a big fan of CNN's Pentagon reporter, Barbara Starr. She was a really good print reporter for Jane's before she made the switch to television. In other words, she wasn't put in front of the camera just because she was blonde and bubbly. She is neither. (Allegedly, another U.S. news network does this. Not gonna say which one.) Barbara Starr's producer is also really smart and has covered defense issues for a long time.
**For those who want more on this, UK-based analyst Martin Murphy also works a lot on Iranian swarming tactics.

UPDATE: This was cross-posted over at Danger Room and generated, like, 100 comments or something. Jeez...

Abu Muqawama doesn't usually post much on Iran, but he just read Max Rodenbeck's long letter from Tehran which ran in the NYRB and thought it good enough to pass along. Max is the Economist's main man in the Middle East.

What is debated, heatedly, in the corridors of power, I was told, is how best to deal with international opposition to Iran's nuclear project. Opinions divide fairly neatly between the country's three main political camps. The reformists, who held sway during the 1997– 2005 tenure of President Mohammad Khatami, believe Iran has little to lose from bowing to the UN Security Council's demand to suspend nuclear enrichment, at least temporarily. Conservative pragmatists, such as those grouped around another former president, Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, call for mixing toughness and flexibility, negotiating with other nations to secure Iran's goals while minimizing potential damage from trade and other sanctions. Ahmadinejad's usulgaran, for their part, appear to believe that Iran should brave out the storm without bending, raising the stakes to increase their leverage on other issues, such as pushing for an American withdrawal from Iraq. International pressure, as they see it, only helps mobilize domestic opinion behind the President. And besides, the hostile West would only greet any concession with demands for more.

Ever true to form, Stephen Peter Rosen writes on the new Middle East Strategy at Harvard blog that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program as a response to the US invasion of Iraq.

In my view, the Iran program halted in 2003 because of the massive and initially successful American use of military power in Iraq. The United States offered no “carrots” to Iran, but only wielded an enormous stick. This increased the Iranians’ desire to minimize the risks to themselves, and so they halted programs that could unambiguously be identified as a nuclear weapons program. They were guarding themselves against the exposure of a weapons program by US or Israeli clandestine intelligence collection, and were not trying to signal the United States that they were looking to negotiate. They did not publicly announce this halt because if they did so, they would be perceived as weak within Iran, and within the region. By continuing the enrichment program, they kept the weapon option open.

Such a response is not surprising, nor is it necessarily all that fanciful. Charlie is not so willfully blind as to deny that a massive invasion of your next-door neighbor might be cause for some nuclear soul searching. But it does beg the following question: if that's what the Iranian leadership learned from the invasion, what have they learned from the occupation?

Charlie is nowhere near enough of a Tehran-watcher to know the answer to this question. But it's not much of a stretch to think that their initial shock and/or awe might be somewhat tempered now.

More broadly, this is one of the many reasons why COIN is not a "lesser-included" task. Our difficulty with SASO/MOOTW/COIN in Beirut, Mogadishu, and now Baghdad has led to a number of unanticipated strategic effects. Iran may well have been cowed by our initial invasion. But there's no reason to believe they haven't been emboldened by its aftermath.

Getting COIN right at the 4 or 5 year mark isn't good enough: enemies near and far exploit that time not just to impose casualties but to learn our tactics, muck up our strategies, and paint us as fools. Advisors, COIN, IW it's gotta be the main effort now. How about getting with the program? Why doesn't everyone jump on the team and come on in for the big win?

Boy, the Washington Institute sure picked the wrong day to issue its new report exploring joint U.S.-Israeli options for war on Iran, eh? Can anyone out there honestly see how hawks can re-build momentum toward bombing Iran after yesterday's new NIE?

Yeah, us neither.

Here's something from the Washington Institute that promises to be a little more relevant. TWI invited U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman and blogger Tony Badran to speak on the presidential crisis. You can listen to the event here. Badran writes a widely-read blog on Lebanon, but ... well, look, Badran is one of the most intelligent analysts out there, but his biases are known for being resolutely pro-March 14th. There's nothing wrong with that -- we all have our biases -- but Abu Muqawama wishes the institute had invited someone in addition to Badran who might be a little more critical of U.S. policy so that folks can see the diversity of opinion that's out there. It doesn't have to be Hassan Nasrallah, but if Jeffrey Feltman can join via speaker phone, surely they could have found a smart political scientist in the States or Lebanon to have given another perspective?

That's the sound of all the air escaping from the beltway's War on Iran balloon.

Update: Charlie, here. There's a fair amount of tea leaf reading going on about when the NIE was originally produced and why it was released now. Kevin Drum says it was Congressional pressure:

Democratic members of the various intelligence committees saw the NIE (or a summary or a verbal report or something) and went ballistic. Footnotes and dissents are one thing, but withholding a report whose primary conclusion is 180 degrees contrary to years of administration innuendo produced a rebellion. Somebody who got briefed must have threatened something pretty serious if the NIE didn't see the light of day.

Joe Klein doesn't disagree, but says,

it also may be that the intelligence community was waiting for the definitive information that made this a "high" degree of certainty estimate rather than a "moderate" degree estimate.

But what really has Charlie riled up is the possibility (probability?) that Drum is right on this:

This NIE was apparently finished a year ago, and its basic parameters were almost certainly common knowledge in the White House well before that. This means that all the leaks, all the World War III stuff, all the blustering about the IAEA — all of it was approved for public consumption after Cheney/Bush/Rice/etc. knew perfectly well it was mostly baseless.

Awesome. Love the OVP. It's really irritating when entire offices of the US government have beliefs that are totally not falsifiable. Would anything convince them that Iran and put its weapons program on the back burner? No? Bugger.

As you may know, Abu Muqawama attended his first-ever anti-war conference and demonstration today. The editor of a Hizbollah newspaper was speaking, and Abu Muqawama went to hear what he had to say. Arriving early because he had not pre-registered, Abu Muqawama waited for a good two hours for the event to begin, which it did, 30 minutes late. (Timeliness and general we've-got-our-shit-togetherness may be two of the reasons the military industrial complex seems to out-perform the anti-war crowd nine times out of ten.)

Abu Muqawama sat next to a very nice Swiss woman who came all the way from Zurich for the event, and he politely introduced himself as "Mr. Maceo Parker, from the People's Coalition to Free James Brown." She asked where he was from, and Abu Muqawama said the American South, and that was pretty much it until Ibrahim Mousawi, editor of the Hizbollah newspaper al-Intiqad, got up to speak. When Mousawi greeted the audience with as-salam alaykum, Abu Muqawama responded back with a wa alaykum salam, and this drew an appreciative nod from his Swiss neighbor, who turned her head and smiled. Who knew Tennesseans could master such complex Islamic rituals!

Ibrahim Mousawi was very good. He certainly knew his audience. He spoke in English, clearly and forcefully, and drew more applause than any of the other speakers in the plenary session, George Galloway aside. (More on him later.) Mousawi drew a parallel between Hizbollah's resistance against Israel and the resistance of the anti-war protesters against the forces of imperialism, and this drew much applause. So too, somewhat oddly, did the line that "the future of the region is political Islam, like it or leave it." This surprised Abu Muqawama considering the entrenched secularism of the British Left. But, hey, anything's preferable to American hegemony. Right, comrades?

Anyway, it was interesting, for this blogger, to watch Mousawi interact with an almost entirely western audience. He gets full marks for being eloquent and firing up the crowd without saying anything inflammatory that's going to make the newspapers tomorrow. What was more interesting, though, was watching Mousawi re-act (and not re-act) to Galloway's speech.

"If there was a democracy in Lebanon," Galloway began by thundering, "Hassan Nasrallah would be president!"

This line spurred great applause from the audience as Abu Muqawama thought whether or not this would actually be the case.

"But you have to be Christian to be president!"

This line set in motion furious shaking of heads from most people in the hall, and Abu Muqawama turned to look at Mousawi. This cannot have been too comfortable for him, but he wasn't showing it. Lebanon's politicians -- Hizbollah included -- are currently trying to find a suitable Maronite president while the country remains on a knife edge, and this jackass Scotsman standing on the stage is stirring things up, calling for an end to the entire confessional system. This blogger expected to see Mousawi start squirming in his seat any moment. But Galloway wasn't done showing off his knowledge of the Lebanese political system:

"The prime minister has to be a Sunni. And the Shia ... well, they get the speaker of parliament."

Galloway then tried to convince the audience that the Lebanese speaker of parliament is a nothing post, akin to the Speaker of the British House of Commons. The name of that office-holder, Michael Martin, drew laughs from the assembled masses. But you know who would not have been laughing had he been there? Nabih Berri. The Lebanese speaker of parliament, an important Hizbollah ally who has put together a massive patronage system over the past 30 years, would have been shocked to have discovered he occupies a joke position with no real power.

Abu Muqawama then began to feel genuinely sorry for Mousawi, because Galloway moved on to an even more uncomfortable subject ... Iran:

"I've never been to Iran, have never met an Iranian leader, and don't particularly like the government."

Abu Muqawama had his eyes on Mousawi the entire time, and now he was looking really uncomfortable. It's all well and good to slag off the Iranian regime, George, unless you happen to acknowledge the Supreme Leader of that country as your supreme leader. Which Hizbollah and its followers -- including, presumably, Mousawi -- do.

"You don't have to like the government of Iran," Galloway assured everyone in the room except for the one guy who, actually, kinda does have to like the government of Iran.

But it was all okay, because Galloway then went on to describe the evils of America, and once he started talking about the occupation of Iraq, it was safe for Mousawi to clap again.

Abu Muqawama, meanwhile, left after the plenary session and took advantage of the fact that his gym was a 10-minute walk away. He was going to stay for more, but honestly, there is a limit to the extent to which this blogger will go for the sake of his readers and the greater academic truths. Squat cleans and dead lifts sounded a lot more appetizing.

A few observations:

1. Galloway went on about the inconsistencies of the West -- we want democracy in the Middle East but not Hamas; we can have nuclear weapons but the Iranians cannot -- but one of the things that struck this blogger was how difficult it must be to keep all of those leftists, with all all their individual causes, from contradicting one another. Tony Benn started off the conference by dismissing some environmental conference at Bali as being relatively unimportant, and then a Green Party MEP took the podium and talked about how important the upcoming Bali conference was going to be. George Galloway led the cheers for Iran's nuclear program, which precipitated an awkward silence when Hans van Sponeck called for a WMD-free Middle East and defended the NPT. Talk about a big tent! On one side of the auditorium there was a Free Palestine! desk and on the other end was a crew demanding the immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. What do those two causes have in relation to one another aside from a common enemy to be found in the U.S. of A.?

2. It's interesting how two different narratives have built up as to how the 2006 Lebanon War started. The established, fact-based narrative says the war began on 12 July 2006 when Hizbollah attacked across the Blue Line and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. Pretty much 98% of the world's population is cool with this fact -- even those who aren't big fans of Israel. But Hizbollah and the radical Left talk about "the Israeli war on Lebanon" as if nothing happened on 12 July. Abu Muqawama has intelligent, otherwise-reasonable friends who dispute the established narrative, saying Israel broke certain "unwritten rules" when they responded to the kidnapping. Okay, Abu Muqawama says, the response was certainly over the top and strategically foolish, but what are these unwritten rules that govern the Blue Line and say Israel can't respond militarily to a kidnapping? Does UNIFIL know about them? Does Israel? Abu Muqawama then gets patronizing rolling of eyes and shaking of heads as if to say, You stupid American, you're so locked into the hegemonic discourse that you can't open your eyes to see the truth. Maybe Abu Muqawama is a stupid American, but he's traveled up and down the Blue Line on both sides of the border and has yet to hear of any "unwritten rules" that Israel broke when they responded on 12 July. That's not a value judgment -- that's just the way it is. But Abu Muqawama doesn't think there were many people at the conference who would have disputed the Hizbollah narrative.

3. The entire session -- even when he had to listen carefully to the Iraqi delegate, who was speaking in Arabic -- Abu Muqawama could not for the life of him get the Outkast song Two Dope Boys (In a Cadillac) out of his head. Seriously. It's been in his head all day.

It goes chromes to the Fleetwoods, Coupes to the Villes...

Abu Muqawama has not posted much on Lebanon recently, but that's not because that troubled little country isn't on his mind. Much of his time in the library these days, in fact, is spent reading about Lebanon's last civil war. For those of you following the political events that have been taking place in the country these past few weeks, you'll know that if Lebanon doesn't elect a new president within the next few days, we could all be heading toward a new civil war.

From a U.S. policy perspective, part of the problem boils down to three things:

1. The U.S. doesn't seem to realize -- publicly, at least -- that the Lebanese populace is really quite evenly divided between the two warring camps. We would prefer to think that our allies in the pro-West March 14th alliance command a solid majority of all Lebanese, but recent polling data indicate that isn't the case.

30 percent identify themselves with the opposition and 28.4 percent identify with the March 14 coalition, yet the greatest percentage of respondents, 37.2 percent, gave no answer regarding their allegiance. When asked who would win the next elections, 37 percent of respondents indicated the opposition and 34 percent indicated the March 14 coalition.

2. You get the feeling the U.S. would rather "wish away" the 35%+ of the population that is Shia and for whom Hizbollah is the sole political representative. From a U.S. policy perspective, it would be a lot easier if those people just didn't exist, or there was a political alternative to Hizbollah (no, Amal is not an alternative), or they didn't have the support of a large part of Lebanon's Christian community.

3. The U.S. insists on seeing the conflict in Lebanon through the prism of its greater clash with Iran. That is the subject of an op-ed in today's washingtonpost.com, in which Abu Muqawama's friend Steve McInerney and some other guy argue this is a huge mistake. While we're viewing Hizbollah as a conflict with Iran, some of our allies in Lebanon and the greater Middle East are funding and manipulating some nasty transnational Sunni terror groups -- the kind of guys who were not only responsible for the recent fighting in Nahr al-Bared but also the worst terror attacks in Iraq. (Oh, and that whole 9/11 thing.) We said post-9/11 that we would not allow another terrorist safe haven after Afghanistan, but that's exactly what the Palestinian refugee camps have become -- often with the support of U.S. allies.

These groups don't have the popular support in Lebanon that Hezbollah boasts. But that also means they have no "red lines" of violence they will not cross. And, while Hezbollah wants to play an expanded political role in the Lebanese state, the Sunni extremist groups would like nothing more than to see the collapse of the state into anarchy and civil war -- truly a worst-case scenario both for Lebanon's fragile democracy and for regional security.

Earlier this year, one such group, Fatah al-Islam, incited three months of clashes with Lebanese security forces around the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr el-Bared. During a recent congressional hearing, the assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, David Welch, characterized the fighting as "extraordinary, unexpected." He also emphasized that the threat had been dealt with. "Today, the only armed militia in Lebanon is Hezbollah," he said.

In fact, many analysts had predicted violence involving emerging Sunni radical groups "in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south." While promoting their own interests in the power vacuum created by the Syrian military withdrawal in 2005, some of America's closest allies in the Lebanese government and nearby Saudi Arabia and Jordan are believed to have supported the growth of the Sunni extremist groups. Moreover, thanks to a steady stream of Sunni militants from Iraq -- the types responsible for the most horrific attacks there -- continued growth is expected for the foreseeable future. At least, as long as the U.S. continues to look the other way, and as long as U.S. efforts to help the Lebanese military confront such groups are viewed with suspicion.

For the lighter side of the Lebanon crisis, meanwhile, read this article. (Thanks, Seth.)

In the wake of the IAEA's announcement that Iran might be able to begin building a nuclear warhead within a year, the Guardian's headline reads: Decision time for the U.S.

Really? So this is only a U.S. problem then? Abu Muqawama is not exactly a hawk on Iran, but headlines like these make me wonder what the %$#@ the Guardian's editorial line might be on nuclear proliferation? Are they pro-proliferation, and it's only the U.S. (in our madness) that doesn't think a nuclear-armed Iran is in the world's best interests? %$#@, no wonder John Bolton is such an ass to the Europeans. As soon as a major diplomatic challenge presents itself, too many in the Old Continent fold their arms and says, smugly, Well, America, what are you going to do about it?

Thankfully, not everyone is out of their bloody minds. Martin Kettle, for example, spoke the hard truth in his column last week:

European governments - Britain included - need to face up to some very serious truths about the coming decade. The big lessons that the US will learn from the Bush years - whoever wins in 2008 - are to build up national defences and strengthen homeland security but avoid trying to change the world. There will be no appetite for discredited neocon crusades. But there will be little enthusiasm for large multilateral engagements involving significant commitments of US ground forces, either. [Kori] Schake compellingly argues that if Europe wants a problem solved in the post-Bush era - whether in Darfur, Kosovo, Iran or Afghanistan - then Europe must do more to help solve it. We cannot rely on the US to do all the heavy lifting.