Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Originally Posted by Chris

Iran knows it can never win a game of battleships in the Gulf. It has been working instead on swarm tactics that can overwhelm a large naval vessel’s defences. You see a small example of it in these reports of the Stena bulk carrier being escorted by no fewer than 10 speedboats into Iranian waters. Those same tactics, which mandate the owning of a large number of small, fast craft, enables Iran to go after just about any cargo vessel it chooses, in the absence of a close-by naval vessel, wherever in the Gulf it happens to be.

If we were going to effectively police the Strait of Hormuz we would need numbers, not size. HMS Duncan is a formidable air defence destroyer but she’s designed to protect an area of operations from incoming fast jets by shooting them down at long range. That ability is no use here. HMS Montrose saw off a similar Iranian gambit the other week by being in close proximity and pointing her deck gun at the Iranians. Clearly Iran doesn’t want a shooting war it can’t win, so it backed off. Duncan would be able to do the same if it was in the right place at the right time, but it’s just one ship and clearly no naval vessel was in the right place at the right time to intervene here.