US sent Iran an aircraft-carrier ‘message,’ but it’s at a disadvantage

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, announced on Sunday that the US would send the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and its associated strike group to the waters near Iran to “send a message” and respond to vague threats.

But the US will be sending the powerful carrier to a job it’s arguably ill-suited for, putting thousands of sailors at a major military disadvantage. And if a conflict were to arise, the sinking of a US aircraft carrier would be in Iran’s sights.

Though the carrier’s deployment to Iran’s nearby waters may have been planned long ago, Bolton has been clear that the ship’s return to the region marks a response to “a number of troubling and escalatory incident and warnings” from Iran.

Read more: Why the US suddenly decided to send an aircraft carrier and bombers to check Iran

While Bolton did not get into specifics, a report from Axios said Israel passed the US “information on an alleged Iranian plot to attack” US forces or interests in the region.

The Wall Street Journal cited US officials as saying new intelligence “showed that Iran drew up plans to target U.S. forces in Iraq and possibly Syria, to orchestrate attacks in the Bab el-Mandeb strait near Yemen through proxies and in the Persian Gulf with its own armed drones.”

Read more: Iran harassed and humiliated the US Navy under Obama — here’s why it stopped under Trump

US aircraft carrier strike groups represent the highest order of naval power ever put to sea, but they’re not the right tool for every job.

Caitlin Talmadge, an associate professor of security studies, said on Twitter that US carriers are “designed for operations on the open ocean.”

As a floating air base with guided-missile destroyers and cruisers sailing nearby for antimissile defenses from land and sea, the carriers are best off when moving around far from the range of missiles fired from the shore.

The narrow, “confined waters of the Persian Gulf make carriers tremendously more vulnerable to asymmetric air, land, and naval threats,” Talmadge wrote.

Iran’s home-field advantage could sink a tanker

In the shallow brown waters of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow pass through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through, Iran’s outdated submarines and missiles see a vastly uneven playing ground leveled out.

“Ideally, a Nimitz-class carrier would operate within comfortable range of its targets (based on the range of its air wing) but at sufficient stand-off distance to minimize the risk of enemy threats,” Omar Lamrani, a senior military analyst at the geopolitical consulting firm Stratfor, told Business Insider. “This varies based on operating environment but is usually between 300 to 400 nautical miles.”

Aircraft carriers do send a message and have been relied on for such by presidents for decades, but according to Talmadge, it’s kind of empty in this situation.

Read more: Iran releases video of its submarine sinking a US aircraft carrier by exploiting a key weakness

In the Gulf wars and against militants such as ISIS, aircraft carriers made plenty of sense.

“Iraq has tiny coast, couldn’t contest US carrier presence, so unusual situation,” added Talmadge, who said that Iran was a different kind of beast.

But “Iran’s geography & military capabilities, particularly presence of significant assets near Strait of Hormuz, make sailing carrier through Gulf a lot riskier, and w/ less benefit given US ability to deploy carriers in Arabian Sea & Indian Ocean instead,” she said.

In fact, the Persian Gulf, Iran’s home waters, plays directly into their hands. One of Iran’s favorite and best documented ways to harass the US Navy is to use fast-attack boats in a swarming attack.

Swarm boat attacks would “not be much of a danger in the open sea,” where the carrier had room to maneuver, but could be a problem in the choked gulf.

“Iran has various systems that can be a threat within the Persian Gulf, including anti-ship cruise missiles, fast attack craft and swarm boats, mini-submarines, and even asymmetric tactics like UAV swarms that seek to harass rather than disable the carrier,” Lamrani added.

Read more: Iran has found a new way to mess with the US Navy

Aircraft carriers lack onboard defenses against torpedo attacks, something that an old Iranian submarine could manage. In the noisy brown waters of the Persian Gulf, the US Navy may also struggle to track such small boats.

Furthermore, the Iranian media has fantasized for years about sinking an aircraft carrier. In the country’s state-controlled media, the massive ships are often seen as targets ripe for sinking.

With US-Iranian relations hitting a startling new low, the Trump administration’s decision to send an aircraft carrier to Tehran’s home waters seems like a risky choice with little apparent payoff.

Accompanying the carrier deployment announced by Bolton was an increase in bombers in the region. Business Insider has previously reported that Iran is highly unlikely to attack even small exposed groups of US troops in the region because the response from nearby US air bases would all but obliterate the country.