On March 23 of this year, while conducting a routine boarding
operation of a merchant vessel off the coast of Iraq, fifteen
British sailors and Royal Marines were approached by two speedboats
filled with Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen. Though armed, the
British troops
surrendered to the Iranians without a fight, and were quickly
taken to Tehran, where they were held captive for just under two
weeks.
The capture of the British sailors raised several questions. For
example, why wasn’t their ship, the HMS Cornwall, within
range of their operation, so as to provide cover for the rubber
inflatable boats (RIBs) from which the boarding teams were
operating? Why did the British helicopter tasked with loitering
over the RIBs during the boarding operation leave its station? Why
did fourteen armed British fighting men, and one woman, simply give
in, and decide, in the words of Royal Marine Captain Chris Air,
that “fighting back was simply not an option?”
Most of all, though, the question raised by that event is this:
Why was the British Navy neither prepared for, nor even expecting,
such a move on the part of the Iranians? For this was not the first
time in recent times that Iran — a nation that has favored
diplomacy-by-hostage-taking since the revolution of 1979 —
attempted to take sailors hostage in the Gulf.
Just last Thursday, the BBC reported that a little more than two years before the
episode involving the British sailors, an attempt was made to
abduct a boarding party from the Australian Navy in similar
fashion, and in a similar location.
In December 2004, a contingent of Australian
sailors was debarking a cargo ship it had boarded to inspect, which
had run aground near the maritime border between Iran and Iraq,
when up to five gunboats, manned by Revolutionary Guardsmen,
approached the much smaller allied force. As the heavily armed
Iranian soldiers neared — reportedly making “very overt gestures”
at the sailors — the commander of the Aussie boarding party
ordered his men back into the cargo ship “and established a very
credible and appropriate defensive position,” according to
Commodore Steve Gilbert. The Iranian forces “made a concerted
attempt” “to capture the boarding team,” according to the BBC
report (which quoted a source within the Royal Australian Navy),
but the Australians “were having none of it.”
The larger, more heavily armed Iranian force was reportedly
“repelled in the face of machine guns and highly colourful
language,” and after a four-hour standoff, the Australian sailors
were airlifted off the deck of the cargo ship by an RAN helicopter.
As the BBC report pointed out, “the circumstances for the Britons
in March were slightly different in that they were caught so much
by surprise that, had they attempted to repel the Iranians with
their limited firepower, they would doubtless have taken very heavy
casualties.”
However, that is not the salient point to take from this
incident. The real question, rather, is why the British Navy
apparently learned so little from the Australians’ experience that
they were caught completely off guard when Iran utilized the same
tactics and attempted the same act — and succeeded.
ALTHOUGH MANY (INCLUDING ME) EXCORIATED the British sailors for
their lack of resistance, as well as for their stated reasons for
surrendering (fear that “a gun battle would risk an escalation of
tensions with Iran”), the fact is that many errors, both tactical
and strategic, had to be made for such a small British crew to be
outmanned, outgunned, and caught completely by surprise, out of
range of its naval vessel and with no helicopter on station, and
therefore left with little choice but to fight a possibly losing
battle, or to surrender to their Iranian attackers. After three
months of investigation, though, the British military just last
week issued the results of its investigation into these events,
officially finding nobody at fault. From the report:
The events of 23 Mar were the result not of a single
failure or any particular individual’s human error, but rather of
an unfortunate accumulation of factors — many relatively small
when viewed in isolation — but which together placed our personnel
in a position that could be exploited through a deliberate act by
an unpredictable foreign state.
Such a confluence of events, at such an inopportune time, strongly
suggests that the naval commanders in the Persian Gulf took their
jobs, their surroundings, and their situations less than seriously,
preferring to operate as though they were not engaged in combat
activities, and as though there was no threat from external foes.
That attitude, and the occurrence of such an incident which
resulted in the abduction of the British sailors, clearly shows
that the Royal Naval force in the Gulf failed to learn anything at
all from the Australians’ experience in 2004.
According to the BBC report, “Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admiral
Sir Jonathon Band, has recently admitted there was a need for
greater strategic awareness in the northern Gulf.” It would be
difficult to conceive of a more obvious statement. Not only did
this episode demonstrate a shocking lack of tactical situational
awareness on the part of the British parties involved, but it
showed a lack of awareness on a much larger scale, as well,
regarding the nature of the enemy in the region. As U.S. State
Department spokesman Sean McCormack recently said, the Iranian
regime has shown time and again during its quarter-century of
existence that it “continues to view hostage-taking as a tool of
its international diplomacy.” That Britain somehow lost sight of
this fact — and let its guard down while operating so close to
Iranian waters, despite knowing what it knew about the recent
effort to abduct Australian seamen — is the most inexcusable
aspect of this incident.
The surrender of the British soldiers, and their appalling behavior in captivity, are a different
topic. Given what is now known, the real question is not why the
small group of British sailors acted as they did in their surrender
and captivity, but why they were put in that position in the first
place.
