Navy Moves Smaller Coastal Craft To Persian Gulf As We Pull Big Ships

Once again, the US Navy is moving more warships to the Persian Gulf. This time, though, we’re not sending an extra aircraft carrier or another task force. This is arguably a de-escalation of possible tensions with Iran. In a nutshell, the Navy is replacing big ships with small ones.

The three new ships – Tempest, Squall, and Thunderbolt – are Cyclone-class PCs, which stands not for “personal computer” or “politically correct” but “patrol, coastal.” They are relatively small vessels – 179 feet long, 380 tons displacement, and boasting just 28 crew. They are well-suited to shallow waters, protecting oil rigs, and working with our Arab allies’ modest fleets. Another two PCs, Hurricane and Monsoon, will join the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet next year, leaving just three in US home waters to do (primarily) counter-drug operations for 4th Fleet out of Mayport, Florida. Meanwhile, however, the Navy’s cutting back on aircraft carriers, destroyers, and even minesweepers on duty in the Gulf.
 

That’s not to say the Cyclones can’t fight. In fact, the five already homeported in Bahrain are being upgunned with Raytheon-made Griffin missiles, the same relatively short-ranged weapon being added to the controversial Littoral Combat Ships. (The newly arriving PCs will get their Griffins later). Last year, the Navy just happens to have successfully tested the Griffin against small fast-attack craft, the favored watergoing weapon of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“We’re just installing the Griffin missile system on the patrol craft now. That’s a laser-guided rocket that will help counter any kind of swarm tactic,” said Capt. Joseph Naman, commander of 5th Fleet’s coastal patrol craft, in a conference call this morning with reporters. “I would take the PC over a swarm [of fast-attack boats]. Pound for pound the punch is much harder.”

 Three Navy coastal patrol craft arrived in the Persian Gulf this morning aboard a transoceanic transport ship

Loading up small craft with heavy machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades is a cheap way to put firepower on the water, but they may not hit much of anything. “The speedboats with the guns and the guys hanging off with RPGs, all those [weapons] are unguided, all those are not stabilized,” Naman explained. In the Gulf, “we’re normally seeing about one to three-foot [waves] on a good day and maybe five to seven-foot seas on some of the interesting days we have.” That’s bad news for the Revolutionary Guard gunner trying to eyeball his target from a jouncing deck. By contrast, even before the Griffins are installed, the Cyclones have two 25-milimeter quick-firing cannon and a multitude of machineguns, all on stabilized mounts to keep them on target in rough seas.

 The coastal patrol craft USS Tempest in the Persian Gulf.

That’s still a lot less firepower than the bigger and more-expensive-to-operate warships that the Cyclones are effectively replacing. This spring, the Pentagon announced the Navy would halve the number of aircraft carriers patrolling the Persian Gulf at any given time from two to one – which also cuts in half the accompanying cruisers, destroyers, and submarines – because it simply could not afford to sortie the carrier strike groups under the budget cuts known as sequestration. (The uncertainty over a stopgap spending measure called the Continuing Resolution, since resolved, was also a major factor).

The Navy’s also cutting back on patrols by its workhorse Arleigh Burke DDG-51 destroyers, Capt. Naman said. “The slight decline in DDGs closely correlates to our decline in forces in Iraq and our drawdown in Afghanistan,” he told reporters. To support the wars on land, the fleet has been making longer and more frequent deployments over the last decade, to the point that both ships and their crews are getting tired. Now, said Naman, “we’re trying to stretch [out] the time between deployments a little bit longer so we can do the maintenance on the ships we need to.” (But sequester complicates maintenance as well).

“It doen’t mean we’re going to do away with the DDGs,” Naman emphasized. But as the patrol craft flotilla increases from five historically to eight now and 10 next year, he said, “we’re picking up a lot of the missions they were doing.”

 Tugboats move the newly arrived USS Tempest into harbor in Bahrain.

Most of those missions are low-profile cooperation with the Gulf Cooperation Council states – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the UAE, and the big brother, Saudi Arabia. Building up local partners is the best long-term bulwark against Iran, and those partners’ own fleets consist largely of smaller coastal craft much more similar to the Cyclones than to the Arleigh Burkes. Those international missions include training exercises – “there’re over 15 of them we do every year with the GCC nations,” said Naman – and protecting offshore or coastal installations such as the ports, oil rigs, and desalinization plants on which the region’s economy depends. In the shallow waters of the Gulf, small can be beautiful, Naman said: “We can go more places with the PC than we can with the DDG based on the draft alone.”

A mission the Cyclones can’t perform, however, is minesweeping. The Navy doubled the number of Avenger-class mine counter-measures (MCM) ships in the Gulf from four to eight last year amidst Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, but now it’s sending the extra four Avengers home again. “They made a conscious decision to bring additional MCMs over here temporarily,” said Naman. “It wasn’t a homeport shift; it was a deployment….We have moved some portion of those back; the remaining ones will go back this fall.”

In the long run, the mine-clearing mission will fall to the Littoral Combat Ship, which will also hunt submarines and Iranian-style small attack boats. (The LCS will have plug-and-play “mission modules” to tailor it for each of the three threats). While the Navy has made major progress on LCS’s costs, it’s still working out both tactics and technology for the highly unconventional new ships.

Both variants of the Littoral Combat Ship are also about eight times larger than a coastal patrol craft (3,000 tons displacement versus 380). So even in the future, the Navy will likely need both types for different missions in different depths of water. For now, until the LCS becomes fully operational, it’s up to the Cyclones to patrol the shallows.

US Navy Boosts Arabian Gulf Patrol Craft Force

Three more US Navy patrol coastal (PC) vessels have arrived in Bahrain, growing the permanently based force in the Arabian Gulf to eight ships.

The additional ships — Tempest, Squall and Thunderbolt — arrived June 30 aboard the heavy-lift ship Eide Transporter, completing a five-week voyage from Norfolk, Va. They were floated off early July 3 and taken across Manama’s harbor to the military base at Minah Salman.

“We’re very excited to be here,” Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Servello, commanding officer of the Squall, told reporters during a conference call July 3. “We’re looking forward to making a difference.”

The crews of the ships made the passage by air, flying out in advance of the ship’s arrival.

Five of the Navy’s 13 PCs have been based at Bahrain with the US Fifth Fleet since the first ships were deployed in 2003. Two more PCs, Hurricane and Monsoon, are to transfer to the gulf by mid-2014, growing the force serving US Central Command to 10 ships.

Three PCs will remain stateside and eventually shift their homeport from Little Creek, Va., to Mayport, Fla.

Some of the PCs now being sent to the gulf saw little service in recent years. Some were incapable of operations, having provided spare parts to the active ships. Now, however, the ships have been thoroughly refitted and upgraded, with more improvements to come for operations in the gulf region.

“They’re perfectly suited for what we do,” Capt. Joseph Naman, commander of Bahrain-based Destroyer Squadron 50 serving the Fifth Fleet, said during the conference call. “There’s a lot of shallow water out here.”

The Fifth Fleet, Naman pointed out, routinely operates with navies and coast guards from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which employs ships considerably smaller than the large Arleigh Burke-class destroyers fielded by the US.

“A PC matches the size and capability [of coalition navies] well,” Naman said. “The interaction we get with the PC is excellent. We integrate well. It’s the right move to bring those ships out here.”

The PCs, which were underutilized in the US, have found a new mission in the gulf, where they’re in great demand. Naman described some of their missions.

“The PCs are doing maritime security operations day-to-day here and in the Gulf of Oman. They identify illicit criminal activity and work with the GCC so they can take action. The ships protect critical infrastructure — oil platforms, distilling platforms, some of them in the middle of the gulf.

“We also do theater security cooperation exercises, over 15 every year with the GCC nations. PCs participate in every one of those. They provide escort for high-value assets [such as aircraft carriers] or ballistic missile defense ships — and not just in the Arabian Gulf, but through the Strait of Hormuz and out into the Gulf of Oman.”

The PCs have been upgraded with stabilized Mark 38 gun mounts for their 25mm guns, Naman pointed out, and the laser-guided Griffin surface-to-surface missile system is being installed.

“Pound for pound the punch is much harder on a PC than over a swarm craft,” he noted.

It won’t be too long before the newly arrived ships are ready for operations.

“Ballpark, within 10 days we’ll be ready to go,” Servello said. “The systems were all checked out before we left Norfolk and are activated.”

Immediately after being refloated in Bahrain, all three ships lit off their diesel generators, Naman said.

“They started up the air conditioning, the radars. Everything worked like it was supposed to. When we put them in the water there was not one issue.”

The growth in the PC force, combined with the reduction of land operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, is allowing the US to reduce the number of destroyer deployments to the region, Naman said.

“I can’t speak to specific numbers,” he said, “but we’re going to try and reset with [the reduced] operational tempo. We’re going to stretch out [destroyer] deployments. There will be some amount fewer than what we had in the heyday of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are trying to get back to a more long-term sustainable pace of deployment.”