December 21, 2018
The Iranian Navy has launched a new warship, which it calls a destroyer, claims that it enjoys stealth technology and reports that it can stay deployed for five months, longer than any Iranian ship before it.
The new warship, named Sahand, is not really a destroyer, however. It displaces 1,300 tons, or only one-eighth the 9,600 tons of the current Arleigh Burke-class of US destroyers. By modern naval standards, the Sahand qualifies as a corvette, the smallest type of ocean-going warship.
The Sahand also fails the test of being a stealth warship. It has too many sharp angles.
As for the time it can spend deployed at sea, that remains to be seen. The Iranian Navy said Sahand can stay at sea for 150 days with one supply ship attending it. That would be a major improvement, if it pans out. None of the more than 53 deployments Iran has made of a air of ships to anti-piracy duty off Somalia has stayed out even as long as 90 days, and some have come home in just 40 days.
After the Sahand was commissioned at Bandar Abbas December 1, the Navy announced that it would soon be deployed with one supply ship accompanying it to Latin America. The Navy first announced back in July 2011 that it planned to send a ship into the Atlantic Ocean. In November 2016, it said it did dispatch a ship to the Atlantic. That ship sailed to a port in South Africa and then sailed out into the South Atlantic before returning after a day or so to the South African port.
Rear Admiral Touraj Hassani-Moqaddam, the deputy commander of the Navy, told the Mehr news agency, “Among our plans in the near future is to send two or three vessels with special helicopters to Venezuela in South America on a mission that could take five months.” He said the Sahand and the logistics support ship Khark were designated for that voyage. Moqaddam said nothing about sailing off the coast of the United States, as his boss implied last year when he said Iran’s ships would enter the Gulf of Mexico.
Iran claims that the Sahand is entirely made in Iran with absolutely nothing foreign on board. That has been a standard claim for each warship launched for many years. However, photographs of a previous “destroyer” revealed a plate on a topside component saying the component was made in Germany, so the claim that the Sahand is entirely made in Iran needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
The rear deck of the Sahand is a helicopter landing platform. The Navy hasn’t said how many helicopters it will be able to carry.
At the commissioning ceremony, Rear Admiral Ali-Reza Shaikhi, head of Navy shipyards, said, “This vessel is the result of a daring and creative design relying on the in-house technical knowledge of the Iranian Navy, and has been built with stealth technology.”
Iran launched its first warship of this class in 2010 as part of its effort to develop a domestic arms industry and make Iran self-reliant in all its needs.
Shaikhi said it took Iran six years to build the Sahand, which is a very long time for a ship of its small size. The US Navy’s Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates, which are more than triple the size of the Sahand, generally took two years from being laid down to being commissioned.
The Sahand is the third ship of its class launched by Iran. The Jamaran was launched in 2010 and the Damavand was launched in the Caspian in 2013, but sank earlier this year. Those two ships were reverse-engineered from ships the Iranian Navy had bought from Britain before the revolution. The Sahand is a larger version.