Iran War Update: Day 11
By 
Not great, Bob!
Mines are a problem, and if Iran begins laying in earnest it will severely disrupt transit through the Strait regardless of how brave and manly the ship captains are. Trump administration and the Gulf states are straining to keep a lid on oil prices but it seems like that strain involves lots of “pretend very hard.”
Other reading:
- On the limits of airpower…
- And an air campaign primer…
- Fractures in the anti-regime movement in Iran…
- The nuclear program also survived air attack…
Long read on the last days of the Dena:
The festivities included a city parade, where one Dena sailor, speaking to an independent journalist, Samson Sagar, marveled at the flavor of biryani, an Indian rice dish he had sampled. “So spicy!” the sailor said, covering his mouth.
The hosts had arranged for the Iranian crew to tour the local sites. A highlight was the INS Kursura, a Soviet-built, 300-foot submarine commissioned by the Indian Navy in 1969 that had been transformed into a museum ship. Roughly two dozen sailors from the Dena ducked through a makeshift door cut in the side of Kursura’s hull, passing through a forward compartment outfitted with six compressed-air launch tubes and storage racks holding spare bright green torpedoes.
The naval gathering was itself a relic of an earlier age, when rival militaries could coexist in the security of a global order that gave priority to stability above all else. Adm. Steve Koehler, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, attended and met with Indian leaders. The U.S. sent a P-8A Poseidon spy plane but elected not to send a destroyer as it had in the past. The Dena was part of Iran’s regular navy, not the more ideological Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy.
The event concluded on the morning of Feb. 25. The following day, the Iranian Embassy in Sri Lanka, 800 miles to the south, asked permission for the Dena and two other naval vessels to dock for what it described as a goodwill visit starting March 9.
The ships were already close to Sri Lanka’s maritime border, raising concerns among some officials in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital. The request for a goodwill visit from the ships struck the island nation as potentially risky, given every possibility of a conflict breaking out between the U.S. and Iran.
“We all know that a certain buildup was there in the Arabian Sea and the region,” said Sri Lanka Defense Secretary Sampath Thuyacontha, a retired air vice marshal. “It’s a very complex situation.”
The Sri Lankans stalled for time. The Iranian ships hung around—“loitering,” in the words of Sri Lanka’s deputy foreign minister—as the U.S. and Israel launched their first attacks on Feb. 28. Thuyacontha said Sri Lanka told the Iranians that Sri Lanka would follow a 1907 treaty that says neutral parties should allow naval ships that are at war to dock only if there is emergency aboard.
The three Iranian ships scrambled to find safe harbor elsewhere. The next day, India approved a request from Iran for the three ships to dock, said Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
The Dena didn’t go. For reasons that remain unknown, it was still trying to make port in Sri Lanka as late as last Tuesday.
Skipper of the boat should have made a different choice. I have grown exceedingly tired of discussing LOAC and the sinking of IRIS Dena, but this account is definitive:
The law of naval warfare leaves no doubt that the torpedoing of the Dena by the Charlotte was lawful as a matter of location and targeting. Enemy warships qualify as military objectives and are accordingly subject to attack whenever found outside neutral waters. Neither the fact that the Dena was in Sri Lanka’s EEZ nor that it had been performing ceremonial functions alters that fundamental rule. The same is true regarding the claim that it was unarmed. And the fact that a submarine was used as the platform from which to mount the attack triggered no constraints beyond those that would apply to surface warships, such as proportionality and precautions in attack. Those were certainly satisfied.
The more difficult question is whether U.S. forces complied with their obligation, so far as military exigencies permit, to search for and collect those who were shipwrecked after the engagement. It is an obligation that undeniably applies in submarine warfare. However, it is not absolute and has to be applied in light of operational realities. Although we do not have access to the full picture of the attack, our conclusion is that even if the Charlotte did not call for assistance, there was no breach of this obligation, given the immediate distress call from the Dena, the rapid dispatch of SAR maritime and air assets by Sri Lanka and India, and the near certainty that the U.S. submarine and other U.S. forces were aware of the immediate and ongoing SAR response.
Photo Credit: By Martin Meise – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37921121