Last week, the USS Gerald R. Ford began making its way home after 314 days at sea. This is the longest carrier deployment in modern history, of the most advanced warship ever built. It was an extraordinary number, but the story of what those 314 days actually did to that ship, and the ships that stayed behind, tells you more about the Iran-US standoff than any missile strike or ceasefire statement. To understand it, you need to understand where these ships have been sitting.
The Persian Gulf is one of the most hostile bodies of water on the planet for military hardware. It is shallow, averaging around 50 metres deep, compared to the thousands of metres the North Atlantic drops to. It is enclosed, with almost no circulation from the open ocean. It is hot, regularly pushing 35 degrees Celsius at the surface in summer and it is extraordinarily salty, significantly more so than normal seawater, because the intense heat accelerates evaporation in a semi-closed basin with very little rainfall to dilute it.
The Nimitz-class carriers (the backbone of American naval power), were designed in the early 1970s with the cold, deep waters of the North Atlantic in mind. That was the Cold War context: a potential confrontation with Soviet forces in European waters. The Persian Gulf is the environmental opposite of everything those ships were built for.
Saltwater is far more corrosive than freshwater because the salt dissociates into ions that accelerate the electrochemical reactions that eat through metal. Areas with higher salinity, like enclosed tropical seas, see faster metal degradation on hulls and infrastructure. A ship sitting in the Gulf for months is essentially soaking in one of the world’s most corrosive baths. Biofouling (the build-up of marine organisms on the hull), reduces manoeuvrability and can diminish top speed by up to 50% while driving up fuel consumption significantly. Engines have to work harder to push a fouled hull through the water. Harder work means more fuel. More fuel means more cost. More cost means Washington is spending money just to stay there.
Then there are the cooling systems. US Navy warships pull seawater in to cool their engines, electronics, and internal systems. In the North Atlantic that water is cold and does its job well. In the Persian Gulf, you are pulling in warm, salty, heavily mineralised water and running it through systems that were never stress-tested for those conditions. Everything works harder. Corrosion maintenance and repair already cost the US Navy an estimated $7 billion annually and that is in normal operating conditions. Extended Gulf deployments accelerate that bill considerably.
Advanced naval engineering does not eliminate the systemic pressures created by prolonged forward deployment in volatile theaters. The three destroyers that have endured the most direct exposure, the USS Truxton, USS Mason, and USS Rafael Peralta, came under sustained Iranian attack involving missiles, drones, and small fast-attack boats as they transited the Strait of Hormuz. None were hit, but none were left unchanged either. These ships have spent months in Gulf conditions, intercepting incoming threats, running their defensive systems at high tempo, and absorbing the environmental punishment that every day in those waters brings. They represent the sharp end of what prolonged Gulf presence actually costs. Iran understands all of this. It has understood it for decades.
One expert on the Revolutionary Guards described the IRGC navy as a maritime guerrilla force. “It is focused on asymmetrical warfare, especially in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Instead of relying on big warships and classic naval battles, it depends on hit-and-run attacks.”
The IRGC Navy maintains thousands of small fast-attack craft and specialises in swarm tactics, combining speed, mass, coordinated manoeuvre, low radar signature, and concealment. These boats scramble quickly from coastal bases carved into rocky Iranian shoreline. They are cheap enough to lose. They don’t need to sink an aircraft carrier. They just need to keep it busy, keep it stressed, and keep the bill running.
Iran used these tactics during the 1980s Tanker War with Iraq, inflicting damage on vessels with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns in shallow coastal waters where the boats could attack and disappear among the islands and reefs. The doctrine has been refined but the logic hasn’t changed. Make the cost of confronting Iran high enough that the confrontation itself becomes the problem.
The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group has been in the region since late January. The Ford was there for months before heading home. The environment, the operational tempo, and the accumulated wear are all adding up – quietly, expensively, and exactly as Iran’s strategists intended.
Iran does not need to win a naval battle. It never planned to. Its strategy has always been to make the Islamic Republic expensive to confront. The Persian Gulf, with its hot, shallow, salty, and corrosive nature is doing a significant part of that work on Iran’s behalf, without firing a single shot.
Written by:
*Dr Iqbal Survé
Past chairman of the BRICS Business Council and co-chairman of the BRICS Media Forum and the BRNN
*Chloe Maluleke
Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group
Russia & Middle East Specialist
**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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