www.wnd.com, Jun 13, 2017- One Iranian official has outlined a strategy through which his nation, with access to the Persian Gulf, could pursue an attack on a U.S. aircraft carrier, a type of vessel that his nation does not possess…
Iran’s navy does include some submarines and surface vessels that are designed for carrying missiles. But the behemoths that carry thousands of pilots and sailors, can attack an enemy miles away with jet-delivered rockets, and more are not yet in Iran’s hands. They have announced they want one.
So, according to a report from the experts at the Middle East Media Research Institute, one of Iran’s officials has worked out a plan of attack anyway.
“We want very fast boats, because the speed of the [U.S. carrier] is at most 40 km/hr,” he said. “Now, think of 300 fast boats armed with weapons and Katusha [rockets] approaching at 130 km/hr. Who will win? The enemy carriers provide fuel, ammunition, bunks, and hangar storage for aircraft. … We will attack these vessels first.”
The comments come from Gen. Ahmad Mousavi, commander of a special forces unit of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
In the statement, from just a couple weeks ago, he explained, “A member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff noted that [the Americans have] no answer to our strategy, because from a certain distance their radar cannot detect [our] swift boats.”
MEMRI explained he was speaking of the first anniversary of the death of Mohammad Naeri, a senior official of the nation’s Navy commando unit.
However, the specifics of the carrier attack plans may need some work.
U.S. carriers can attack approaching vessels from far away with their armed jets, and there are few ships that actually could reach the 130 km/hr that the plan assumed. That’s about 81 miles per hour and online resources indicate mostly the fastest speed-racing boats are in that range.
For example, a submarine’s fastest speech was in the range of 50 miles per hour, and an experimental Canadian hydrofoil, which never was put into production, was assessed at about 72 mph.
