It's time for our monthly open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
Overhauls are Classes, Weather at Sea, Auxiliaries Part 0, Revolt of the Admirals Part 1, Modern Propulsion Part 4, The Nimitz Class and for 2025, my reviews of the Naval Aviation Museum and Alabama, Measuring Fleets and Iowa and Kahoolawe.
Comments
Will there be a material amount of transit through the Strait of Hormuz before there is a wider settlement (whatever that may look like) between the US and Iran? Either via escorted convoys, freighters making a run for it, or some sort of brokered deal/carveout?
(There is a Financial Times story circulating that France and Italy have approached Iran on permitting passage, but I can't find an unpaywalled link to it)
I recommend Sal Mercogliano's YouTube channel "What's Going on With Shipping", he is doing concise 15-20 minute summaries every day.
The short version would be no chance in hell of a material amount of transit. Before the shooting started there were around 120 ships every day. It's not just the straits, but the entire Gulf that needs to be protected.
Hegseth says that the Iranian navy has been destroyed, but Ukraine and the Houthis have both shown you don't need a navy to run a sea denial campaign in confined waters.
The big news of the day is that the USS Tripoli and several thousand marines are on their way to the middle east. The discussion I hear is that we might use them to take land around the strait, or Kharg island. As someone who knows very little, I have three questions:
How long will it take for them to get to Iran? I believe they're starting from Japan.
Given the situation on the ground, do we expect an amphibious landing to be opposed? Or otherwise difficult?
What kind of escort craft, if any, will be accompanying the Tripoli?
@FLWB All of this is open source information. 1. Travelmath.com lists the distance between Okinawa and Dubai as 3872 nautical miles. With a speed of advance of 18 knots equals 432 nautical miles. So maybe 10 days, maybe more if they run into bad weather. The amphibious ready group (ARG)is supposed to act together, so it's likely all 3 ships are going.
2. Depends on the target, a Marine Expeditionary unit is a reinforced rifle battalion with artillery support and maybe some armored fighting vehicles. The Marines no longer have tanks. As how they will be used, maybe take Kharg Island (maybe a bit much for a MEU) or (my guess) seize/occupy a number of the small islands near the Strait of Hormuz to help support anti drone boat operations. 3. While there are US destroyers based in Japan, it's likely that the three ships will not have a surface escort until they get much closer to Dubai depending what Iranian threats remain. I would be surprised if there isn't at least one SSN around the ARG at all times. With some AWACS support to provide warning the ARG should be able to protect itself from any air or surface threat. I doubt Iranian has any subs left.
Back in October 2025 when bean wrote about Drone Countermeasures, I speculated that a country that had just been bombed by the USA and had no other way to strike back might launch an Operation Spiderweb drone style attack on mainland USA.
After recent events I'd say that has become almost a certainty.
Regarding my comments from yesterday: based on Trump's comments reported this morning, the MEU will invade and occupy Kharg Island if Iran does't stop attacking oil and natural gas carrying ships in the Persian Gulf. That will effectively destroy their economy.
I have no doubt that there are some intelligent Iranian army officers that recognize what's going to happens soon, but the Iranian political leadership and IRGC leadership have a different perception of reality and still think that they can "win" or negotiate some kind of deal with the US.
That seems like a pretty confused set of goals. The Iranians aren't exporting any oil through Kharg Island right now anyway. Sending in the Marines to occupy it just exposes us to higher American casualties. I'm pretty sure she's on the way because she's basically all we have left to send.
Boots on the ground (even if it’s an island isolated from the rest of the country) seems like it changes the calculus around whatever the eventual end game is, as well as the domestic politics.
@Bean You're correct, Iran isn't exporting oil (at least through tankers) right now and the Iranians transferred most of the oil out of the Kharg Island storage tanks to tanks on the mainland. Wikipedia says 90% of Iran's oil exports go through Kharg Island. Iran can not allow the US to control Kharg Island. The problem for Iran is I don't think they can take it back and they can't afford to have the oil tanks and other oil related equipment seriously damaged either. Any attempt to gather enough forces to re-take the island will be seen by satellites or drones and targeted by air strikes. There seems to be a pattern with Trump: 1 Negotiate in good faith, but progress must be made 2 Use economic pressure to force the desired compliance 3 Use targeted action by the military to achieve the desired result with the least amount of 'innocents' killed or wounded.
We're at 3 now, which means Trump (and Israel) is going after senior political leadership, IRGC senior leadership, military equipment and any factories that produce military equipment. We seem to be making a serious effort to avoid casualties among the civilians and the regular Iranian military.
On a totally different note - the Jules Verne Trophy record was recently broken (40 days and 10 hours for Ushant - Ushant) with an average speed of almost 30 knots on track, and still better than 20 knots VMG (though arguably their true VMG was 0).
An impressive feat of sailing and naval architecture, one wonders how much opportunity there is to leverage some of their lessons for powered vessels. (Though it also seems like the range equation is not very favorable for a fossil fueled competitor trying to do the same thing)
I had an opportunity to tour the Battleship New Jersey a couple of weeks ago. Nice cool and drizzly morning meant we had, apart from the workers and volunteers, the ship to ourselves.
Quiet impressive to be up on the bridge looking over that magnificent bow.
Question: How does the NJ setup and walking tour differ from what I would see on the Iowa in Long Beach? Anything strikingly different?
As impressive as it is to see a vessel of this size, I would like to have been up there when it was out on the high seas in really heavy weather. I was trying to imagine what it must have felt like with the bow crashing into large waves and how much roll there was 50' or more above the water. Like with aircraft, museums are great, but ships and airplanes at rest are, sadly, a bit out of their element.
Second question: For those sailors with their normal duty stations deep in the bowels of the ship, how often could they get topside to get some fresh air and, hopefully, sunshine? I can't imagine you were just allowed to stroll around.
The problem with this logic is that right now, Kharg Island is useless to Iran, and will remain so as long as the US has a bunch of ships parked in the Gulf of Oman ready to intercept any ship exporting Iranian oil. Taking Kharg Island gains us nothing (if you want to damage the facilities, we can do that with JDAM) and has the potential to cost US casualties, as well as rallying domestic support against the "invaders".
@Neal
I haven't been to New Jersey, so I can't say exactly how similar or different they are.
Re the sailors going topside, I think it was allowed so long as you had some free time and there wasn't something going on topside. In practice, it was probably not a daily thing for people who didn't have business there, but it also wasn't unheard of.
@Bean From a strictly military perspective you may be right, I'm not sure what the political implications are and we don't have access to the same information as the planners. I think they have plans for the MEU, I'm just trying to figure what can a reinforced rifle battalion can be used for based the information we do have. It's not especially time sensitive if the planners were willing to wait 10 days for the MEU to arrive and nothings been reported about US Army units being deployed.
Probably the best option for using them is to wave them threateningly off the Iranian coast and hope the threat makes the Iranians move troops around in a way that opens them up for air attack. But I really don't see them actually going ashore for any length of time, because that's been one of the Administration's red lines, and the strategic benefits just aren't there.
Just saw this on Instapundit. I definitely agree with no troops in main land Iran.
https://americanrefugees.substack.com/p/what-us-taking-kargh-island-will?publicationid=2747685&postid=190977100&isFreemail=true&r=131lq&triedRedirect=true
@bean, regardless of the tactical value of taking Kharg Island, do you think they'll face any direct opposition when taking it? How does that look with our modern navy, do they go in on boats first or is it all helicopters these days?
https://www.tradewindsnews.com/tankers/sanctioned-ships-dominate-strait-of-hormuz-tanker-traffic/2-1-1960808?zephrssoott=laT4Pa
There appears to be some moment of ships who have made arrangements with Iran to get safe passage through the Strait.
@FLWAB
I suspect it would be helo-heavy, although there are limits on what helos can bring ashore if they're planning to stay long-term. As for direct opposition, probably. If I were Iran, I'd park a battalion or two there in the hopes that they can inflict serious casualties, because they know what that will do to US public opinion. Unless I'd decided that "they invaded our territory" is better for my domestic PR, in which case, it gets three security guards and a janitor. But I suspect that's not how the IRGC is going to see it.
@FLWAB, @bean That's assuming the USN will actually send something the size of an amphib through the Strait of Hormuz.
Semi-random question on stealth / emissions control - do ships or aircraft have a laser or other ultra-shortwavelength communication systems for line of sight "emcon" operations while maintaining reasonable bandwidth. I know that they practice with semaphores and blinker lights for some operations, and pilots can use hand signals and the like, but those are all very low bandwidth fallbacks for operational messages, rather than exchanging data in the modern sense.
It seems like a laser modem would allow for a several order of magnitude increase in bandwidth, with only a nominal increase in emissions along the line of sight of the laser, which could (presumably) track the recipient.
@redRover, from my unclassified civilian knowledge, unlikely for ships and aircraft.
Major problem with lasers is that they get severely interfered with or blocked by weather such as fog and clouds. (Lasers are basically the same wavelengths we use to see with.) We already have narrow beam high frequency radio, which gives pretty good data rates and usually not clobbered by bad weather.
So far, AFAIK, lasers don't offer enough of an advantage for surface and atmosphere operations. They work great in space. IIRC they can be used for short ranged comms underwater, so maybe for subs controlling USVs?
I think the preferred solution these days is actually highly directional radio systems. I know both the F-22 and F-35 have those kind of systems, and the main reason not to use them on ships is because they're so frequently over the horizon from each other. I suspect that the problem with laser is that it's too directional, and you'd need a more complicated tracking system than a phased array.
@Hugh and @bean
Thank you both!
I suppose that makes sense, though on the tracking I'm not sure it would be that much more than whatever math they have to do to keep the phased array pointed in the right direction and not accidentally beaming a signal directly at the opponent.
The tracking problem isn't math, it's mechanics. A phased array can be installed and all of the beam-forming is done electronically. We can't do that with lasers, so you'd need a mechanical system to keep the laser pointed at the target, and since we're talking about fighter jets, it has to work reliably under high G-loads and the like, which in turn means mechanical complexity and maintenance.
@bean
I am not a systems engineer, but it seems like they've already solved the mechanical gimbal issue things like EO/IR targetting pods.
Though I suppose the real trade-off is that you can reuse a highly directional conformal antenna in low power mode for longer range or less directional transmissions, whereas a laser is a one-trick pony.
I wasn't trying to say that the mechanical problems couldn't be solved, merely that it probably wasn't worth solving in this case them given the available alternative. (There's also potential aerodynamic problems with lasers, whereas you can just slap a fiberglass cover over the phased-array antennas.)
Does the apparent continued importance of littoral operations in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf suggest a different fleet mixture than one primarily focused on blue water conflict in the Pacific? If so, how?
The US would still need to get the ships a significant distance and support them.
@redRover, the Gulf states have quite a lot of small warships that are well suited to littoral combat. In any conflict that wasn't the result of abysmal stupidity, they would be providing the numbers and the USN would provide heavy hitters (Burkes) and air power (carriers) where needed.