October 25, 2024
The Islamic Republic is building its first naval aircraft carrier in an apparent effort at a “prestige project” to show it is keeping up with western military powers. Iran has spoken before of plans to build such a carrier, but the vessel has now been photographed under construction in Bandar Abbas with no announcement it was underway.
Iran has said the carrier will be used by drone aircraft and not by manned planes like the F-14 Tomcat, which was built in the United States by the US Navy for use from aircraft carriers. The ship under construction was originally laid down as a commercial vessel, but then converted to a carrier by adding an angled deck.
However, the ship already had a towering superstructure built the width of the ship and that remains to prevent aircraft from landing or taking off the length of the vessel. The angled flight deck ends in an upward inclined “ski jump” common on Russian carriers, which helps to get a slow-moving plane into the air. The construction was reported August 21 by TheWarZone, which did not have any figures on the vessel’s displacement, but said it is 790 feet (240 meters) long.
The US Nimitz-class carriers are 1,092 feet (333 meters) long or about 40 percent longer than the Iranian carrier. The ship is being built by the Pasdar maritime arm and is to be named Shahid Baqeri. The purpose of the new warship is not exactly clear. Iran already can have its drones cover all the Persian Gulf from land and hundreds of miles into the Indian Ocean from land. Therefore, the goal appears to be to send the Shahid Baqeri a great distance out to sea to allow Iran to project power.
The problem is that a carrier operating alone is very vulnerable and needs a large number of ships operating around it as protection. The protective curtain accompanying each US carrier is larger than everything Iran’s Navy and Pasdar maritime arm have in their inventories.
