The Arabian Gulf is now involved in a massive arms race, triggered largely by the fear that Iran will try to use its military forces to intimidate or dominate its neighbors. Iran has threatened to close the Gulf and carried out a wide range of large military exercises to show its capabilities. And Iran has steadily increased its ability to exploit the threat of conventional and asymmetric warfare to maritime traffic in the Gulf. The buildup of Iran’s naval, air, and missile capabilities poses a wide range of threats to maritime traffic into and outside of the Gulf.

This updated resource provides a more comprehensive history, including: Iran's Persian imperial past, the spread of Islam, and the Iran-Iraq War The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) emphasizes an asymetric doctrine to ensure national security in the Persian Gulf against regional neighbors and foreign presence. The Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN) employs a more conventional doctrine and focuses on forward presence and naval diplomacy. Both navies have considerable equities and are well positioned to influence and leverage the Strait of Hormuz; a vital chokepoint for the flow of resources and international commerce. Illustrated with organizational charts, and photos of key Iranian leaders, including commanders within the Navy Command and Control Leadership, as well as rank insignia graphics, maps, ships, aircrafts, missile images, and more. Check out ourMiddle East resources collection for more resources on this topic. You may also be interested in ourForeign Military History collection Other products produced by theUnited States Navy

Like its World War II namesake of Leyte Gulf fame, USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG 58) was a small combatant built for escort duty. But its skipper imbued his brand-new crew with a fighting spirit to match their forebears, and in 1988 when the guided missile frigate was thrust into the Persian Gulf at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, there was no better ship for the job. Forbidden to fire unless fired upon, Captain Paul Rinn and his crew sailed amid the chaos in the Gulf for two months, relying on wit and nerve to face down fighter jets and warships bent on the destruction of civilian vessels. Their sternest test came when an Iranian mine ripped open the ship's engine room, ignited fires on four decks, and plunged the ship into darkness. The crew's bravery and cool competence was credited with keeping the ship afloat, and its actions have become part of Navy lore and a staple of naval leadership courses ever since. This is the first book to record the Roberts' extraordinary tale. After years of research and interviews with crewmembers, journalist Bradley Peniston chronicles the crew's heroic efforts to save the ship as they fought flames and flooding well into the night. The author also describes the frigate's origins, its operational history, and the crew's training. Peniston's personal approach to the subject not only breathes life into the historical narrative but gives readers an opportunity to get to know the individuals involved and understand the U.S. retaliation to the mining and the battle that evolved, setting the stage for conflicts to come.

The United States faces major challenges in dealing with Iran, the threat of terrorism, and the tide of political instability in the Arabian Peninsula. The presence of some of the world’s largest reserves of oil and natural gas, vital shipping lanes, and Shia populations throughout the region have made the peninsula the focal point of US and Iranian strategic competition. Moreover, large youth populations, high unemployment rates, and political systems with highly centralized power bases have posed other economic, political, and security challenges that the Gulf states must address and that the United States must take into consideration when forming strategy and policy.

For the United States, asymmetric warfare has emerged as the “new normal.” The large-scale conventional campaigns that typified U.S. military engagements for much of the 20th Century are increasingly things of the past. Instead, the quarter-century since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the U.S.-Soviet balance of power has seen irregular war truly come of age, with more and more hostile nations pursuing asymmetric means in order to secure the strategic advantage vis-à-vis the United States. In this volume, a group of leading national security practitioners and subject matter experts comes together to analyze the asymmetric strategies being pursued today by America’s main state-based adversaries—Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—and to explore how U.S. policymakers can respond more effectively to them.

In 1983, the world stands at the brink of nuclear annihilation, and only a few people are aware of it. A riveting story of how two men's lives intersect in the midst of an existential crisis, The Able Archers is told through the eyes of two key participants: a young American intelligence officer, Captain Kevin Cattani; and his more experienced Soviet counterpart, Colonel Ivan Levchenko. The story plays out from the skies over Siberia to the gritty, dangerous streets of East Berlin. The radically different worldviews of Cattani and Levchenko punctuate the deep divisions of the Cold War. The evolving relationship between the two men also highlights the humanity common to both sides. Only by working together will Cattani and Levchenko find a way to prevent a global nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The U.S. Navy’s requirement to implement a longstanding rhetorical commitment to partnerships at sea was articulated in the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance, confirmed in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, and was most recently reiterated in the new Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower: Forward, Engaged, Ready. As a means to offset the risks inherent in divesting some maritime presence requirements and being challenged to ensure operational access, however, the Navy’s current efforts fall short of the requirement. As an unclassified, service-specific look at an increasingly important defense policy area, Tailoring the Global Network for Real Burden-Sharing at Sea looks at what the Navy can do from the bottom up to provide for deeper, more structured partnerships as part of a federated approach to defense.

This new handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the issues facing naval strategy and security in the twenty-first century. Featuring contributions from some of the world’s premier researchers and practitioners in the field of naval strategy and security, this handbook covers naval security issues in diverse regions of the world, from the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean to the Arctic and the piracy-prone waters off East Africa’s coast. It outlines major policy challenges arising from competing claims, transnational organized crime and maritime terrorism, and details national and alliance reactions to these problems. While this volume provides detailed analyses on operational, judicial, and legislative consequences that contemporary maritime security threats pose, it also places a specific emphasis on naval strategy. With a public very much focused on the softer constabulary roles naval forces play (such as humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, naval diplomacy, maintenance of good order at sea), the overarching hard-power role of navies has been pushed into the background. In fact, navies and seapower have been notably absent from many recent academic discussions and deliberations of maritime security. This handbook provides a much-desired addition to the literature for researchers and analysts in the social sciences on the relationship between security policy and military means on, under, and from the sea. It comprehensively explains the state of naval security in this maritime century and the role of naval forces in it. This book will be of much interest to students of naval security and naval strategy, security studies and IR, as well as practitioners in the field.

This new study covers the civil and military lessons of the war in Afghanistan as of 2015, the trends at the time of transition, and the risks inherent in the current approach to supporting Afghanistan. The report focuses on the lessons to be learned from the US experience in Afghanistan to date and the problems Afghanistan faces now that most US and allied combat forces have left. The work builds on more than a decade’s worth of reporting and analysis of the Afghan war. It examines the recent trends and problems in Afghan governance, trends in the fighting, progress in the Afghan security forces, and what may be a growing crisis in the Afghan economy. The analysis is supported with extensive metrics on every major military and civil aspect of the war, a detailed analysis of the fighting, and a close examination of the problems resulting from the lack of Afghan political unity, the growing Afghan budget crisis, and critical problems with power brokers and corruption.