May 14, 2021
A US Coast Guard ship fired approximately 30 warning shots at a “large group” of Pasdar fast boats conducting “unsafe and unprofessional maneuvers” near US naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz May 10, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
It was the second time the US warships had fired warning shots at Iranian war vessels in a half-month, something the US had only done a single time before—almost four years ago in July 2017.
The first shooting incident of the month was in the northern Persian Gulf April 26, the second in the Strait of Hormuz, far to the south.
The two incidents put the two countries much closer to war, at least in theory. But a key question was whether the government of Iran had authorized the Pasdar maritime arm to harass the US forces or whether Pasdar officers had initiated the actions on their own, perhaps in hopes of sparking something serious that would cause the Americans to break off talks with Iran about reviving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Six US Navy vessels were escorting a guided missile submarine, the USS Georgia, when the Americans encountered a group of 13 Pasdar “fast attack boats,” Kirby told reporters. The boats approached the US vessels “at high speed,” coming as close as within 150 yards.
After the US tried “all the appropriate and established procedures involving horn blasts, bridge-to-bridge radio transmissions and other ways of communicating,” the US Coast Guard Cutter Maui fired approximately 30 warning shots in two blasts, Kirby said. Following the second round of warning shots, the fast boats “broke contact.”
Kirby said one round was fired when the Pasdar boats were within 300 yards of the US vessels. The second round was fired when they were within 150 yards.
“It’s an international waterway, and of course, when you’re in the strait, there’s certain limits to your ability to maneuver. I mean, it is a chokepoint in the region, so it’s not insignificant that this kind of dangerous, unsafe and unprofessional behavior occurred there,” Kirby said.
The Iranian government said nothing. But the Pasdar quickly responded in its usual manner, by accusing the Americans of doing what the Americans accused the Pasdaran of doing. A Pasdar statement accused the US ships of “unprofessional behavior such as flying helicopters, firing flares and aimless and provocative shooting. It would be better for the Americans to avoid unprofessional behavior and not to endanger the security of the Persian Gulf by obeying the rules and regulations of the sea.”
US Navy Commander Rebecca Rebarich, a 5th Fleet spokesperson, told reporters that, at one point, two of the Iranian boats separated from the others and positioned themselves on the other side of the US ship formation, bookending the Americans. The two Iranian boats then sped toward some of the US ships.
After the two Iranian boats failed to respond to the multiple warnings and closed to within 300 yards, the Coast Guard cutter Maui fired a volley of warning shots from its .50-caliber machine gun. It fired another volley when the Iranian boats got within 150 yards.
The two Iranian boats then “altered course and increased their distance from the US forces,” Rebarich said.
The US Coast Guard is not part of the Defense Department, but of the Department of Homeland Security. It main jobs are such things as search and rescue of mariners off the US coasts, maintenance of navigational markers along the coasts, and enforcement of anti-smuggling laws, which frequently brings it into shooting incidents with drug dealers. The Coast Guard actually sees more combat activity than the US Navy.
The two shooting incidents were preceded in April by another incident of Pasdar boats sailing close to US warships in what the US Navy calls harassment. These three incidents follow a long period in which the Pasdaran had restrained themselves and avoid such incidents.
It has, however, attached small mines to many private commercial ships and seized a few since June 2019—actions the US military commander in the regime says he thinks are initiated by local Pasdar naval officers and not ordered from Tehran.
Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, the US commander of the Central Command (Centcom), the US military agency that covers the Middle East, told a conference he thought those attacks on commercial vessels were not ordered from Tehran. He did not discuss the two shooting incidents.
McKenzie said, “The greatest threat probably to commerce in the region would be the IRGC Navy doing something that was not sanctioned by higher authority. And I’ll just say that the activities we typically see in the IRGC Navy are not necessarily activities that are directed by the Supreme Leader, from the Iranian state, [but] rather irresponsible actions by local commanders on-scene.”
In the first shooting incident, the US Navy said the Cyclone-class patrol ship USS Firebolt fired the warning shots after three Pasdar fast-attack boats came within 68 yards (62 meters) of it and the US Coast Guard patrol boat USCGC Baranoff. The US Coast Guard normally has a few vessels assigned to the Persian Gulf as its ships are better designed and equipped to operate in such narrow and shallow waters than the US Navy.
US Navy ships are authorized to fire warning shots only after previous efforts to warn off foreign vessels by radio calls, using loudspeakers and sounding warning horns have had no result. The US Navy made clear that the warning shots had the effect of ending the close encounters with the Pasdar vessels.
Three weeks earlier, on April 2, a Pasdar catamaran cut in front of the USCGC Monomoy, causing the Coast Guard vessel to come to an abrupt stop with its engine smoking. The Pasdar also did that the same that day with another Coast Guard vessel, the USCGC Wrangell, Rebarich said.
Those incidents marked the first “unsafe and unprofessional” incidents involving the Iranians since April 15, 2020, Rebarich said. However, the last previous sea incident before that was in 2018, she said.
In 2017, the Navy recorded 14 instances of what it describes as “unsafe and or unprofessional” interactions with Iranian forces. It recorded 35 in 2016, and 23 in 2015.
The incidents at sea have always involved Pasdar vessels, never ships of the regular Iranian Navy. Typically, they involve Pasdar speedboats armed with deck-mounted machine guns and rocket launchers test-firing weapons or shadowing American ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
The previous spate of sea incidents in the teens helped the US promote creation of the International Maritime Security Construct to cope with Iranian activity in the international waters of the Persian Gulf. That group now consists of 34 countries, although only a few regularly send ships to patrol the Persian Gulf.
In between the two recent shooting incidents, Majlis Speaker Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf told a conference that those foreign forces in the Persian Gulf have “eroded economic opportunities in the region and beyond.” He accused those 34 countries of pursuing ulterior motives not conducive to maintaining security in the waterway. But he didn’t say what those ulterior motives were. Nor did he make any attempt to explain away the fact that, of the eight countries that have Persian Gulf coasts, only Iran opposes the foreign presence there.
He said, “It is certain that a strong Iran has shown in practice that America will never have access to the north of the Persian Gulf and that America’s movements will have no effect on the north of the Persian Gulf,” which sounded like a reference to the first shooting incident two days earlier although he made no specific mention of it. “The Islamic Republic of Iran has shown that it has cut off the US hand from the north of the Persian Gulf.”