Iran Is Using Tiny ‘Mosquito’ Boats to Shut Down the Strait of Hormuz
Key takeaways
- In mid-April, US president Donald Trump had reassured the public in a post on Truth Social that Iran's hemostat fleet did not pose a major problem for the US and Israel.
- “The effectiveness of Iran's fleet of small boats comes from their numbers and their use in swarms, which makes them difficult to counter,” Eisenstadt adds.
- Between the number of vessels at its disposal and the thousands of support drones for air operation, Iran possesses “much more than it needs to effectively force the closure of the strait,” Eisenstadt says.
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Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl/Nur Photo/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story In the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has developed an asymmetrical naval strategy that is crippling the passage of container ships. This “hemostat” uses guerrilla tactics, after Iran's “traditional” fleet was almost entirely destroyed by US and Israeli attacks. No longer able to rely on specialized military ships, Tehran is using an unconventional force made up of dozens of small military vessels armed with missiles, machine guns, and drones. Quick and nimble, this “mosquito fleet” is capable of assaulting ships carrying tons of cargo.
In mid-April, US president Donald Trump had reassured the public in a post on Truth Social that Iran's hemostat fleet did not pose a major problem for the US and Israel. “The Iranian Navy lies at the bottom of the sea, completely annihilated: 158 ships,” Trump wrote. “What we didn't hit are their small numbers of what they call ‘fast attack boats’ because we didn't consider them a big threat.” Less than 10 days later, on April 22, an Iranian attack conducted with the small vessels led to the seizure of two large container ships leaving the Strait of Hormuz, changing the course of the war.
“Iranian fleets of small boats were created during the Iran-Iraq war, with the purpose of disrupting oil tankers in the Persian Gulf that supported the Iraqi war effort,” says Michael Eisenstadt, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy where he is director of the Military and Security Studies Program, who compares them to the “US torpedo squadrons that disrupted enemy naval traffic in the Pacific Ocean and Mediterranean Sea during World War II.”