Three Carrier Concentration

CNN is reporting that the US Navy is planning a concentration of three carriers in the near future. This should be considered a potential war warning or at least a significant coercive threat to the nearby lands.

"The Navy will send three aircraft carriers to waters off Place X for large-scale exercises late this summer, the outgoing U.S. Pacific Fleet commander said.

The Valiant Shield war games will resemble exercises held near the Place X last [year]. Those brought together some 28 ships, 280 airplanes and 22,000 troops"

Well no, actually those three carriers are going to be operating off of Guam. However I anticipate seeing a lot of blog posts and chatter over the next couple of weeks about another three carrier concentration in the northern Arabian Sea or southern Persian Gulf as a precursor to a large scale miltiary strike against Iran. I don't think that this will happen at any point during the Bush Administration.

There are two carrier groups deployed in this area at the moment, and a third group is currently scheduled to arrive at the end of April to replace one of the groups that is currently on station. There is a scheduled overlap of a couple of weeks. Assuming the air wings are at full strength and not suffering readiness issues for being at the tail end of a long deployment cycle, and assuming as the Yorkshire Ranter did in an excellent post at the Fistful of Euros blog, that the US war plan will be on the same scale or larger than some of the declassified non-invasion options against Iraq during the 2002-2003 build-up for the invasion, three carriers without very large scale and significant land based aerial reinforcements do not have the strike capacity to launch or sustain a significant campaign.

More importantly, the US military can read a logistics supply through put map better than I can, and they know that the supply line from Kuwait City to Baghdad International Airport is responsible for over 90% of total ground transported tonnage and extremely vulnerable to being cut off. Light infantry forces and guerrilla groups are in trouble if they are facing heavily armored mobile units, but they are able to fight on their comparative advantage against light logistics units. During the 2004 Sadrist uprising the US supplies to the South were severely constricted. That is why the uprising was such a threat and this ability to cut the southern supply lines remains a very real threat.

If anything the general threat to the supply lines has increased over time for a variety of reasons. The first is that the US military has far fewer allies and known to be loyal units in the south to help protect and clear the highways. Instead the international forces in the South are composed of contigents that are drawing down due to the lack of domestic political support. The Iraqi units in this area are more interested in fighting their own civil war between Sadrist linked units and SCIRI/Badr Brigade linked units than in helping the US Army, and the Iranians have plenty of chits that they can call in. Secondly, the insurgents and potential insurgents are better armed and more effective today than they were three years ago. Combat is a Darwinian process with a very harsh learning curve. The stupidly brave idiots have been killed a long time ago.

Finally, if there is either a threat to the US supply lines, or if the plan contemplates a US ground invasion of Iranian territory, it would require mobile elements in brigade and divisional strength to conduct this operation. William Lind at Defense in the National Interest has an interesting little tidbit at the end of his most recent column:

As a follow-up to last week's column on Operation Anabasis, General Barry McCaffrey's report on his recent trip to Iraq states that:

… at division and brigade level these C3I command posts are not movable. They simply are not prepared to effectively fight a war of maneuver. (For example, against the Syrians or the Iranians.)

We are overly dependant on Kuwait for logistics.

If Iranian military action closed the Persian Gulf, the US combat force in Iraq would immediately begin to suffocate logistically.

This scenario should raise alarms and resignations en masse at the Pentagon. So the combination of the US not deploying a sufficient number of strike assets in the northern Arabian Sea/Persian Gulf area, massive horizontal escalation vulnerability, economic vulnerability and the lack of strategic flexibility strongly dictates, in my mind, against any possible US strike on Iran in the next twenty months.