NATO militaries have increasingly recognized them as a challenge.Įxperts believe the gray zone approach is a central component of Iran’s national security strategy. “Gray zone operations” are coercive, ambiguous actions taken by actors trying to upend the regional order while staying below the threshold that would justify a military response by stronger parties. And Iran has practiced a very wide range of attacks.” “If you can use gray zone operations to achieve your objectives without escalating to more serious conflict, these kinds of operations offer you advantages and a level of security that higher intensity combat doesn’t. Limpet mines, however, are not clearly traceable.Īn attack that makes attribution difficult “creates ambiguity that serves Iran’s interests,” said Cordesman.
“If you fire an anti-ship missile, you can detect exactly who fired it and the exact platform that fired it.” Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The problem with the limpet mine is that almost anyone can acquire and use one,” said Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. The US and others blamed the attacks on Iran, which denied any involvement. A month later, a Japanese and a Norwegian oil tanker were both attacked with suspected limpet mines. On May 12, 2019, four ships in the Port of Fujairah were sabotaged by attackers using the mines. Limpet mines were seemingly used in a series of attacks on tankers in the Gulf of Oman in mid-2019. They are placed just above or below the waterline, and are meant to knock ships out of action temporarily, not to sink them. The damage suffered by the Helios Ray is consistent with an attack using a limpet mine, easily attained explosive devices affixed magnetically to ships by combat divers or combat engineers on small boats. The limpet mines used to attack the oil tanker near the Strait of Hormuz bore “a striking resemblance” to similar mines displayed by Iran, a U.S. The Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned oil tanker Kokuka Courageous that the US Navy says was damaged by a limpet mine, is anchored off Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, during a trip organized by the Navy for journalists, Wednesday, June 19, 2019. “This fits in with Iran being frustrated in its efforts to get at Israel from Syria, where Israel dominates, now acting in their own backyard against Israel because, first of all, it’s a proven modus operandi,” said Eisenstadt. Israel’s air force has launched hundreds, even thousands, of strikes against Iran and its proxies in Syria and Iraq since 2011. A January 2015 strike on a convoy near Quneitra killed an Iranian general and senior Hezbollah commanders, including the son of Imad Mughniyeh, a senior Hezbollah commander killed in Damascus in 2008. However, Israel has displayed competence in sniffing out Iranian actions and a firm willingness to disrupt them using military force. Iran has also been working to arm its Hezbollah proxy terrorist group with precision rocket capabilities, shipping weapons through Syria to Lebanon. It has sent allied forces to the Syrian Golan Heights to set up infrastructure for carrying out attacks on Israeli targets. While Syria is consumed by a decade-long civil war, Iran has been trying to open a new front on Israel’s border. In addition, Iran remains under crippling US sanctions that it is desperate to find a way out of. Military personnel stand near the flag-draped coffin of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an assassinated top nuclear scientist, during his funeral ceremony in Tehran, Iran, November 30, 2020. The assassination came after months of mysterious explosions in Iran, including a blast and fire that crippled an advanced centrifuge assembly plant at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, which is widely believed to have been an act of sabotage allegedly carried out by Israel. Senior Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was traveling on a highway outside the capital in November 2020 when he was killed by what was reported as a remote-controlled machine gun. Tehran is desperate to respond to a series of military setbacks. It caused some physical damage to the ship, but did not cause any deaths or sink the vessel, avoiding unwanted escalation. The operation seems to have been carefully planned, and mirrored a series of attacks on tankers in 2019 and an Iranian campaign against shipping vessels four decades ago. So the modus operandi they are comfortable with is in their backyard now, and the Israelis find it very difficult to defend all their maritime traffic around the world,” he said. “They were successful, at least tactically, with their limpet mine operations in May and June 2019.
0 kommentar(er)
