Right now, ships are not making the move because they don’t know who is in charge, much less what the protocols are. As Admiral Rickover, the father of the US nuclear navy, said: “Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
Who is this now? Is it Iran, or the US? Is it China, or Pakistan, or an NGO? If it’s Iran and you want to pay, who to and in what currency?
Where is the US navy in all this? My working assumption from the start is that it didn’t have enough ships to conduct escorting operations, given the threat levels in the Strait. At the last count, there were eight Arleigh Burke destroyers in the Gulf of Oman. At least two of those will need to stay back to protect the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, but the rest are potentially available for operations up close with the Iranians.
They could go in, under air cover, and extract the five US ships stuck there. This will be one to watch as it would be a good indicator of how credible US intelligence thinks this current ceasefire really is. US warships escorting US-flagged vessels through a new Iranian TSS with IRGCN fast-attack craft in company would be a strange reality, but doable if there really is a ceasefire. It would look good in the US and start setting the conditions for whatever construct the UK is trying to form once US warships have withdrawn.
For other ships and aircraft, there is no avoiding the fact that the UK’s coalition, no matter how big or how willing, will not be able to assemble or maintain any sort of long-term presence that can take on the IRGCN threat in the event of renewed hostilities. The future of the Strait will depend on what the Iranians are willing to agree to.
Another issue our Prime Minister will have is that of trying to set up a maritime coalition with basically no naval resources of his own. This is not a problem of his making. Nevertheless, two years in, this Government has talked extensively about being on a war footing, but has yet to produce any costed plan.
Put simply, the problem is this: Britain needs to spend significantly more money on defence than it now plans to, simply to preserve what is there now – let alone actually increasing our military power. If there isn’t extra money in the year ahead, there will be losses and cuts to our forces. There is simply no more scope for savings: buildings have been run down, property sold off (and then often enough expensively rented back, as with the former naval base at Portland) and stockpiles of everything have been cut.
But the Treasury doesn’t want to spend more, as under this Government that would almost certainly mean more borrowing – and there has already been far too much of that. So the long-awaited Defence Investment Plan probably contains a lot of painful cuts, and the MoD doesn’t get to make the decisions: if a cut means job losses for a unionised workforce, it turns out, it can’t be made – as we have just seen with the Yeovil helicopter factory. Whatever gets it won’t be the planned new medium helicopter, for such helicopters have proved to be all but useless in Ukraine.