About Scott C. Truver

Dr. Truver is director of Gryphon Technologies’ TeamBlue National Security Programs group and is the co-author of the U.S. Naval Institute Press book, Weapons that Wait: Mine Warfare in the U.S. Navy (1991 edition).


Recent Posts By the Author


Opinion: Gaming Distributed Lethality

Opinion: Gaming Distributed Lethality

An MH-60R Seahawk, attached to the “Warbirds” of Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM) 49, flies over the guided-missile destroyers USS Spruance (DDG 111) and USS Momsen (DDG 92), two of the three guided-missile destroyers deployed in a U.S. 3rd Fleet Pacific Surface Action Group (PAC SAG). US Navy photo.

An MH-60R Seahawk, attached to the “Warbirds” of Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM) 49, flies over the guided-missile destroyers USS Spruance (DDG 111) and USS Momsen (DDG 92), two of the three guided-missile destroyers deployed in a U.S. 3rd Fleet Pacific Surface Action Group (PAC SAG). US Navy photo.

“We have to stop thinking of adversary maritime forces as ‘threats’ and instead what they really are: ‘targets’ for our increasingly lethal, distributed surface, amphibious, and submarine forces,” Dr. William Bundy, director of the Gravely Group at the Naval War College, asserted during a recent interview. Read More

Opinion: Expanding the Distributed Lethality Web

Opinion: Expanding the Distributed Lethality Web

An F-35B Lightning II takes off from the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD-1) on May 25, 2015. US Navy Photo

An F-35B Lightning II takes off from the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD-1) on May 25, 2015. US Navy Photo

The U.S. Navy’s Aegis Weapon System revolutionized fleet air defense at the height of the Cold War. The 1983 commissioning of the first Aegis guided missile cruiser USS Ticonderoga (CG-47) and the 26 cruisers that followed provided the Navy with unrivaled capability at a time when an expansionist Soviet navy was bent on challenging the United States on the world’s oceans. Read More

Opinion: U.S. Mine Countermeasures Forces Should Train Like They Fight

Opinion: U.S. Mine Countermeasures Forces Should Train Like They Fight

Mineman 3rd Class Brandon Workman, attached to Commander, Task Group 56.1, inspects the Seabotix robot after recovering it from a night dive during the International Mine Countermeasure Exercise (IMCMEX) 16 on April 13, 2016. US Navy Photo

Mineman 3rd Class Brandon Workman, attached to Commander, Task Group 56.1, inspects the Seabotix robot after recovering it from a night dive during the International Mine Countermeasure Exercise (IMCMEX) 16 on April 13, 2016. US Navy Photo

“Train like we fight . . . fight like we train!” This has been a military maxim for eons. Two decades into the 21st century, nowhere is this more compelling than in the Navy’s mine countermeasures (MCM) capabilities and capacities needed to defeat our adversaries’ weapons that await. Read More

Essay: When it Comes to Ship Survivability, Prayer Isn’t Enough

Essay: When it Comes to Ship Survivability, Prayer Isn’t Enough

Officials survey the damage of USS Tripoli while the ship was in drydock in Bahrain following a mine attack. US Navy Photo

Officials survey the damage of USS Tripoli while the ship was in drydock in Bahrain following a mine attack. US Navy Photo

In the early morning of Feb. 18, 1991, the U.S. amphibious warship USS Tripoli (LPH-10) struck an Iraqi contact mine in the northern Persian Gulf, ripping a 25-foot by 23-foot hole in her starboard side below the waterline. Read More

Essay: Taking Distributed Lethality to the Next Level

Essay: Taking Distributed Lethality to the Next Level

USS Roosevelt (DDG-80) left,the guided missile destroyer USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) and the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea (CG-58) on Feb. 19, 2014. US Navy Photo

USS Roosevelt (DDG-80) left,the guided missile destroyer USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) and the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea (CG-58) on Feb. 19, 2014. US Navy Photo

The evolving Distributed Lethality (DL) concept ––announced last year –– offers a new approach for how the nation might use its naval surface forces as potential adversaries acquire naval capabilities designed to control the sea. Read More

Opinion: U.S. Carrier Force is a Cost Effective National Security Asset

Opinion: U.S. Carrier Force is a Cost Effective National Security Asset

A sailor monitors the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70). US Navy Photo

A sailor monitors the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70). US Navy Photo

“What kind of navy do Americans want?” columnist George F. Will asked in an August Washington Post commentary. “The answer will determine whether U.S. power can, in [Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan] Greenert’s formulation, ‘be where it matters, when it matters.’” Read More

Opinion: Don't Short The Coast Guard's New Cutter

Opinion: Don’t Short The Coast Guard’s New Cutter

Coast Guard rendering of the planned Offshore Patrol Cutter. The service plans to announce the final three designs later this year. US Coast Guard Photo

Coast Guard rendering of the planned Offshore Patrol Cutter. The service plans to announce the final three designs later this year. US Coast Guard Photo

The U.S. Coast Guard has in place ambitious programs to revitalize the U.S. cutter force to meet the daunting requirements of the 21st century. Three cutter classes are under way as of this month. Read More

Arabian Gulf Mine Exercise is Needed Practice for U.S.

Arabian Gulf Mine Exercise is Needed Practice for U.S.

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When an obviously lost tourist approached Arthur Rubenstein on a Manhattan street and asked how to get to Carnegie Hall, the piano virtuoso replied: “Practice, practice, practice!”

So it is for the U.S. Navy and partner navies’ mine countermeasures (MCM) forces operating in the Arabian Gulf in mid-2012. Hosted by the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (USNAVCENT), the International Mine Countermeasures Exercise 2012 (IMCMEX 12) is an international symposium and associated afloat exercise of mine countermeasure capabilities, scheduled for 16 to 27 September at multiple locations in the USNAVCENT area of operations. MCM assets from more than 20 countries on four continents will participate, making it the largest MCM exercise to date.

The operation is “a defensive exercise aimed at preserving freedom of navigation in international waterways in the Middle East,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said. Washington has warned Tehran not to mine the strategic Strait of Hormuz, which the Islamic republic has threatened to do unless international sanctions against its nuclear program are pulled back.

Although IMCMEX 12 is taking place in the Arabian Gulf, it won’t be conducted in the Strait of Hormuz, said Lt. Greg Raelson, Commander Fifth Fleet public affairs in a 20 July telephone interview. “The exercise focuses on a hypothetical threat from an extremist organization to mine the international strategic waterways of the Middle East, including the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Gulf.”

Read More

Iranian Mines in the Strait of Hormuz not 'Showstoppers'

Iranian Mines in the Strait of Hormuz not ‘Showstoppers’

A version of this story originally appeared in June. It has been updated by the author to reflect recent events.

Iran threatens to mine the Strait of Hormuz, petroleum markets react, world economies take notice, and more U.S. and allied naval forces are sent to the region, upping the ante for Tehran and the U.S. Navy.

Iran’s top naval commander, Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, late last year warned that closin the strait would be “easier than drinking a glass of water.” The Obama administration publicly dismissed the threat as “aber rattling,” but also privately informed Tehran that attempting to close the strait would trigger a U.S. military response.

U.S. Navy photo of the USS Enterprise and USS Cape St. George transitioning through the Strait of Hormuz on May 11.

U.S. Navy photo of the USS Enterprise and USS Cape St. George transitioning through the Strait of Hormuz on May 11.

“The laying of mines in international waters is an act of war,” Vice Adm. Mark Fox, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, said in a Feb. 12 interview.

“We would, under the direction of the national leadership, prevent that from happening. We always have the right and obligation of self-defense and this falls in self-defense. If we did nothing and allowed some mining,” he noted, “it would be a long and difficult process to clear them.”

Whether an “act of war” or not (the international rules — admittedly more honored in their breach than observation— do allow for peacetime mining of high-seas areas under certain strict conditions. Iranian officials have threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S. and international sanctions over its nuclear program.

Read More

Mine the Gap: Iranians and the Strait of Hormuz

Mine the Gap: Iranians and the Strait of Hormuz

Iran threatens to mine the Strait of Hormuz, petroleum markets react, world economies take notice, and more naval forces are sent to the region, upping the ante for Tehran and the U.S. Navy.

Iran’s top naval commander, Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, late last year warned that closing the strait would be “easier than drinking a glass of water.” The Obama administration has publicly dismissed the threat as “saber rattling,” but also privately informed Tehran that attempting to close the strait would trigger a U.S. military response.

“The laying of mines in international waters is an act of war,” Vice Adm. Mark Fox, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, said in a Feb. 12 interview.
“We would, under the direction of the national leadership, prevent that from happening. We always have the right and obligation of self-defense and this falls in self-defense. If we did nothing and allowed some mining, it would be a long and difficult process to clear them.”

Whether an act of war or not (the international rules––admittedly more honored in their breach than observation––do allow for peacetime mining of high-seas areas under certain strict conditions), Iranian officials have threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to Western sanctions over its nuclear program.

U.S. Navy photo of the USS Enterprise and USS Cape St. George transitioning through the Strait of Hormuz on May 11.

U.S. Navy photo of the USS Enterprise and USS Cape St. George transitioning through the Strait of Hormuz on May 11.

But the ultimate impact of such an escalation––if only in rhetoric––is unclear. According to a Jan. 23 report by the Congressional Research Service “…as in the past, the prospect of a major disruption of maritime traffic in the Strait risks damaging Iranian interests. U.S. and allied military capabilities in the region remain formidable. This makes a prolonged outright closure of the Strait appear unlikely. Nevertheless, such threats can and do raise tensions in global energy markets and leave the United States and other global oil consumers to consider the risks of another potential conflict in the Middle East.”


A key transportation route for a daily flow of 17 million barrels of oil––about 35 percent of world seaborne petroleum trade––according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Strait of Hormuz is approximately 175 nautical miles in length and narrows to 21 nautical miles wide, making it an “international strait” under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. Such international straits, which are completely enclosed by the 12-mile territorial seas of the littoral states, have special protections under the UNCLOS regime, even as the United States has yet to ratify the treaty.

Since the end of World War II mines have seriously damaged or sunk four times more U.S. Navy ships than all other means of attack combined. Fifteen of 19 ships have been mine victims. And that doesn’t include many more ships sunk or damaged by mines, from the Corfu Channel crisis of 1946 to the Arabian Gulf Tanker War of the 1980s to the Tamil Sea Tigers sinking of the MV Invincible in 2008.

During the Tanker War in the Arabian Gulf, Iraq and Iran indiscriminately deployed several types of mines, including variants of the 1908 Russian-design contact mine that nearly sank the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) in April 1988. After the United States agreed to provide protection for convoys of oil tankers, the first convoy ran into trouble when the U.S.-flagged supertanker MV Bridgeton struck a mine that blew a large hole in its hull. Almost immediately, the U.S. Navy surface warships fell in line abaft Bridgeton, giving lie to the adage that every ship can be a minesweeper once. If more mines were present, Bridgeton was to clear the way.

In 1990 and 1991, Iraq deployed more than 1,300 mines in the northern gulf––including a weapon never before seen in the West. In the early morning of 18 February 1991, the USS Tripoli (LPH-10), which had embarked airborne mine-countermeasure helicopters, struck an Iraqi contact mine; four hours later, the Aegis cruiser Princeton (CG-59) fell victim to a Manta mine, a “mission-kill” that took the cruiser out of the war and cost about $100 million to bring her back on line. More to the point of the impact of a possible Iranian mining campaign in 2012, it took the Multinational Coalition forces more than two years of intensive mine-countermeasure operations to declare the northern Gulf mine free.

According to then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, in 2009 more than 1 million mines of 300 types were in the inventories of more than 65 navies. Russia had about 250,000 mines. The Chinese navy was estimated to have about 100,000 mines, including a rising mine that could be deployed in waters deeper than 6,000 feet. And North Korea had about 50,000 mines. All three sell weapons to virtually any navy or terrorist group, anywhere, any time, as do another 17 or so countries.

Iran has acquired a stockpile of 3,000 to 6,000 mines, mostly of Soviet/Russian, Chinese or North Korean origin. Most are unsophisticated but still dangerous bottom-moored buoyant contact mines, like those that damaged Roberts and Tripoli. Other mines, like the Manta that struck Princeton, are bottom mines that come to rest on the bottom and wait for a target to satisfy various parameters. These influence mines fire when increasingly sophisticate target detection devices sense magnetic, acoustic, seismic, water pressure, electric-potential signatures of their victims.

One Iranian mine, the Chinese-produced EM-52, is a multiple-influence (acoustic, magnetic, pressure) rocket-propelled straight-rising mine, armed with a 600-pound high-explosive warhead, that can be deployed by surface vessels in waters as deep as 600 feet.

The inventory also reportedly includes about 600 advanced, multiple-influence mines bought from Russia, including the MDM-3 that can be dropped from an aircraft.

Mines can be put in place by virtually any submarine, surface and airborne platform. To mine the entirety of the Strait of Hormuz effectively would take thousands of mines and several weeks if not longer. Iran could use Kilo-class submarines, which can carry 24 mines. But a larger operation would have to involve small craft and possibly commercial vessels, as well. A 2010 report by the Institute of Near East and Gulf Military Analysis shows these Iranian mine-laying platform capacities:

Physics will help bound the problem. Generally, the water depth of the strait varies from about 200 feet to 300 feet, but its approaches from the northwest are shallower, on the order of 120 feet deep. In the strait itself, depths can reach 1,000 feet and currents make deploying bottom mines an uncertain tactic. If deployed in deep water, even large-warhead bottom mines would have limited effect of surface traffic.

Libya’s mining of the Red Sea in the summer of 1984, for example, used East German-export multiple-influence bottom mines completely unknown in the West. Ships that detonated mines in deeper water had much less damage than those in shallower water. (A total of 23 ships claimed to be mine victims, although four were assessed later to be insurance scams.)

 

Not that bottom mines wouldn’t be employed where it made operational sense, but Iran would likely rely on bottom-moored contact mines that lurk close to the surface but remain difficult to detect and defeat.

Mines are only one element of Iranian anti-access/area-denial weapons, which include speedboats armed with guns and missiles, small and mini-submarines armed with torpedoes, shore-based anti-ship missiles, and aircraft.

In response to Iran’s mine-rattling, the Navy is deploying four additional Avenger-class MCM ships to the region, for a total of eight Avengers, as well as two more MH-53E airborne MCM helicopters added to the two already in-theater. The additional units will be based in Bahrain, home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. “I came to the conclusion we could do better setting the theater,” Chief of Naval Operation Adm. Jonathan Greenert told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a Navy budget hearing earlier this year. “I wanted to be sure … that we are ready, that our folks are proficient, they’re confident, and they’re good at what they do in case called upon.”

The Navy has also announced that the USS Ponce (LPD-15) is being refitted to support naval forces in the region, primarily focused on the MCM mission. An interim Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB), her “main battery” will be AMCM helos and support craft. This, too, has been done before, with the conversion in the mid-1990s of the USS Inchon (LPH/MCS-12) as an MCM command-and-control ship.

In addition, the naval MCM “order of battle” include several Royal Navy MCM vessels and Royal Australian Navy assets, as well as MCM capabilities of America’s regional maritime partners.

“It’s a volume issue more than a technical challenge,” Navy Lt. Cmdr. Wayne Liebold, the skipper of the USS Gladiator (MCM-11), one of the Bahrain-based Avenger MCM vessels, told The Huffington Post. “My concern is going out there and having to search a large volume of water with large quantities of mines,” said Liebold, who has done three MCM deployments to the gulf.

Though easily detectable, the laying of several hundred mines in a matter of days could have a significant, albeit only temporary, effect on commercial and naval mobility. More broadly, however, the impact on world petroleum markets is unclear. During the Red Sea/Gulf of Suez mine crisis of 1984, commercial and naval traffic continued unabated, despite reports of underwater explosions, and world petroleum prices were virtually unaffected.

“Conventional wisdom might suggest that the initiation of hostilities in the Strait of Hormuz or Persian Gulf would stop or significantly deter the flow of maritime traffic through the strait,” Cmdr. Rodney A. Mills wrote in a 2008 Naval War College study, “but the ‘Tanker Wars’ between Iran and Iraq in 1980s show a different behavior by the shipping industry. During the eight years of the conflict, 544 attacks were carried out against all shipping in the Gulf, including more than 400 civilians killed and another 400 injured. However, after an initial 25 percent drop, the shipping industry adjusted to the risk and the flow of commerce resumed. Despite the threat, oil and other maritime commerce continued to flow even as the conflict intensified through 1987, when a total of 179 attacks were carried out, or roughly an attack every other day.”

In short, while Iran’s mines might not be show-stoppers, they certainly can be speed bumps that attack strategies, plans and timelines, in addition to ships and submarines.