Sean Rayment is reporting for the UK's Telegraph:
Battleships, aircraft carriers, minesweepers and submarines from 25 nations are converging on the strategically important Strait of Hormuz in an unprecedented show of force as Israel and Iran move towards the brink of war.
Western leaders are convinced that Iran will retaliate to any attack by attempting to mine or blockade the shipping lane through which passes around 18 million barrels of oil every day, approximately 35 per cent of the world’s petroleum traded by sea.
A blockade would have a catastrophic effect on the fragile economies of Britain, Europe the United States and Japan, all of which rely heavily on oil and gas supplies from the Gulf.
The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s most congested international waterways. It is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point and is bordered by the Iranian coast to the north and the United Arab Emirates to the south.
Can Iran close the Strait of Hormuz?
This is what I reported in the EPJ Daily Alert in November 2010:
This afternoon I attended a meeting where the speaker was Capitan Jeffrey Kline. Kline is the Program Director, Maritime Defense and Security Research Programs, Naval Postgraduate School. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Naval War College where he teaches, "Joint Analysis for the Warfare Commander".
While his speech was about piracy on the high seas, I took the opportunity after his speech to ask him about the Strait of Hormuz. The strait is a very strategically important waterway between the Gulf of Oman in the southeast and the Persian Gulf. A lot of oil passes through the straight, 20% of all world oil trade. You can't spend more than 5 minutes with an oil trader after bringing up the possibility of war with Iran before talk turns to the closure of the Strait.
There are many, many opinions as to the whether the strait can be closed. I even heard Boone Pickens (Who knows more about oil than any other man I have met) say at a Michael Milken Conference that he couldn't imagine that the strait could be closed, given that at its narrowest point, the traffic lanes are 6 miles wide.
I thought I would ask Kline, who might have a pretty damn good idea if the Straight could be closed by Iran. His answer was it could. When I asked him how long it would take, he said 3 or 4 days for Iran to position ships and lay mines. He did say that the blockade could eventually be broken, but it would depend upon international co-operation and that it would take "some time". He said that Iran has missiles onshore aimed at the strait that would have to be taken out, and that Iran had other sophisticated equipment in the area including drones that could listen in on ship communications. He said ship mine sweeping can also get "very tricky".
I am not sure how much of Kline's analysis holds up if there is already a major joint U.S.-U.K. presence in the area. My guess this would make the operation more difficult, but notice Kline did mention that Iran has drones that can listen to ship communications. Thus, if Iran is capable of knowing where U.S. and U.K. ships are presumably they will have limited ability to place some mines.
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