Originally Posted by
dogle
In the way, way back I had a brief but fascinating spell assisting Her Maj’s Mine Countermeasures boffins - whiIst I must remain forever silent on what exactly we were up to back then, it was quite an eye-opener.
In early WW II there was a problem when Fritz started dropping mines with magnetic pistols ... countermeasures were swiftly developed, vide those very strange looking Wellingtons! ... but by the end of the war Fritz had fielded an new nasty with pressure-wave pistols, which were unsweepable other than by using something the size of a big ship to set them off .. so after VE Day we left it to Fritz to clean up his own backyard.
I truly dread to think what wholesale unsweepabilty today’s smart electronics convey to modern naval mine systems.
The draft of a loaded VLCC is something like 20m, and in the ~ ~ 60m depth of the Strait, I presume it would not need a huge charge of modern explosives to achieve the requisite mayhem. Should that be so, Iran retains the capabilty to close the Straits for many months by mining whether by airdrop from whatever air assetts remain to them (Piper Cub,anyone?) or even by ‘fishing’ vessels.
Well, what I feared might happen is today being reported by CNN et al. - mines are now being deployed by the IRGC - oh, dear! - Uncle Donald, have you now been Trumped by the bad guys?
[ Disclosure - I am still long Brent .. you bet! }.
MCM is the least sexy warfare area and almost never gets the attention it deserves. I remember attended a planning conference for a combined USN RCN exercise as a junior LCdr. I got to chatting with one of the USN Mine Warfare Ship CO's who was participating in the exercise. I asked him how it was going and he just sighed and said "Oh Just as I expected the CTG approach to the mine threat is the WAMTAMO method (Wish Away the Mines Then a Miracle Occurs). It soon became obvious he wasn't wrong.......