This weekend’s reports that a US drone was downed over eastern Iran comes on the heels of weeks of reports of saber rattling and other troubling developments.   Anyone with even a passing interest in the GOP debates witnessed a stunning amount of bravado from nearly all Republican candidates cheer leading for continued war in the Middle East and specifically a new round of violence with Iran – Ron Paul being the notable exception.  The LA Times is reporting that there have been dozens of unexplained explosions in Iran over the past two years, the most recent one nearly leveled a military based with dozens killed, and offers Israeli or CIA involvement as a possible explanation.  They are not alone in that conjecture as Haaretz has offered the same explanation.   The media has widely reported with a nearly gleeful tone that the US Airforce has taken delivery from Boeing the newest generation of “bunker buster” bombs with the explicit target being Iranian nuclear facilities. These reports follow other media reports of weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates which describe a sale of nearly 5,000 JDAM kits  to convert its existing “dumb” bombs into precision guided ordinance as well as another 600 blu-109 bunker busters.  It takes little imagination to see that the intended targets of those munitions is Iran.

What has received much less media attention is the existing arsenal of Iran’s missile capability and the potential impact on the Fifth Fleet which operates in the Persian Gulf.   Iran possess Chinese-made Silkworm missiles as well as Russian-made Sunburn missiles as well as a variety of domestically produced missiles. It remains unclear whether the US Navy can actually defend against the Sunburn missile (or its next-generation replacement the “Yakhont”) as these missiles were designed to overcome the Pentagon’s ship-based anti-missile tech including its most notable Close In Weapons System the Phalanx and likely the Aegis system as well. Very recently, Russia has also sold to Iran radar-jamming tech as reported by emirates247.

What makes the foregoing of special concern, and which takes these facts out of arm-chair war gaming, is the Pentagon’s own assessment that such a conflict could result in much of the Fifth Fleet being sent to the bottom of the Gulf.  In 2002, the Pentagon war gamed a Gulf scenario named the Millennium Challenge 2002 whereby the US faced off against an “unknown” Gulf adversary.  The result was that 16 ships including an air craft carrier and 20,000 service personnel (many being Marines aboard amphibious craft) were destroyed.  Bear in mind that the unknown adversary was not armed with the much more advanced Russian-made missiles currently in Iran’s quiver.

Another, slightly more dated, example is the Falklands war.  Argentina with an arsenal of only a handful of Exocet missiles sank two British ships. The British ships also employed various anti-ballistic countermeasures.  And, like the virtual deaths in the Millennium Challenge 2002, many British sailors found their reliance on those counter-measures misplaced.

In any real war between the United States,  much of Iran would be reduced to rubble, many (and hopefully all) of its nuclear facilities and its war-fighting capability will be seriously and perhaps permanently degraded. Nonetheless, what will be the result of the loss of a US Carrier group — or even a single ship — on the psyche of the American population?  Given that the US hasn’t lost a ship since the Korean War in 1952, such an impact is hard to gauge.   What will it do to our ability to keep China in check given its well-known cyberwarfare and satellite killing capability as well as its well-publicized theft of our own Aegis system a decade ago?  What will be the effect on oil prices (and hence the US and world economies) when the Straits of Hormuz are blocked by the smoking hulks of US ships?

It is not beyond the pale to imagine that the result will be a permanent rearrangement of the balance of power not only in the Gulf, but also in the Pacific with the US no longer in a position to preserve its waning economic hegemony through the threat of force.