US has video of Iranian provocation

AP:

The U.S. military has video and audio recordings of Iranian high-speed boats that threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. convoy in the Persian Gulf and plans to release them, the top U.S. Navy commander in the Mideast said Tuesday.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards said that its boats never threatened the U.S. vessels during the encounter early Sunday in the Hormuz Strait, insisting it only asked them to identify themselves then let them continue into the Gulf.

But U.S. Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff disputed that account, saying the incident was "provocative."

Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. 5th Fleet, which patrols the Gulf and is based in nearby Bahrain, said the identity of the American vessels was obvious, they were clearly marked and the incident took place during daylight when they could be seen.

"I can't help but conclude that it was provocative," Cosgriff told The Associated Press during a telephone interview Tuesday — the same day President Bush was scheduled to leave for his first major trip to the Middle East.

"There is video" of the incident, Cosgriff said. "We're using it as part of our assessment. That will be made available in due course, as well as the audio."

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Wired Danger Room has this description of Iranian tactics:

Iranian naval swarming tactics focus on surprising and isolating the enemy’s forces and preventing their reinforcement or resupply, thereby shattering the enemy’s morale and will to fight. Iran has practiced both mass and dispersed swarming tactics. The former employs mass formations of hundreds of lightly armed and agile small boats that set off from different bases, then converge from different directions to attack a target or group of targets. The latter uses a small number of highly agile missile or torpedo attack craft that set off on their own, from geographically dispersed and concealed locations, and then converge to attack a single target or set of targets (such as a tanker convoy). The dispersed swarming tactic is much more difficult to detect and repel because the attacker never operates in mass formations...

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To ensure that it can achieve surprise in the event of a crisis or war, Iran’s naval forces keep U.S. warships in the region under close visual, acoustic, and radar observation. The Iranian navy commander—Rear Adm. Sajad Kouchaki, one of the architects of the country’s naval doctrine—recently claimed that Iranian submarines continually monitor U.S. naval movements, frequently at close range, and have even passed underneath American aircraft carriers and other warships undetected. Iranian UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] also frequently shadow U.S. carrier battle groups in the area.

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I am skeptical that Iran could have its submarines go underneath a US aircraft carrier undetected particular in the Persian Gulf which is not that deep to begin with. The forces that would take out Iran's naval capacity would probably not be a position where Iran could monitor them. Think stealth aircraft and cruise missiles launched from outside Iran's widow of vision. It is also highly probably that Iran's command and control and other observation assets would be gone in minutes of the opening of a conflict with the US.