— by Odysseus
It’s Not a Propaganda Prop; They are Planning an Attack
The American news media has reported recently that National Reconnaissance Office images show that the Iran military is building a mock-up of a United States Nimitz Class aircraft carrier. What has been nicknamed the “Target Barge” is actually a two-thirds scale mockup of the USS Nimitz. The media has also noted that the Iranians have scaled back their usual harassment of US Naval exercises in the Gulf, which are usually plagued by close range swarming by fast attack boats and remotely-piloted drones equipped with intelligence gathering pods (presumably, ELINT, SIGINT or optical which could be easily replaced with offensive munitions). The info-tainment media has quickly dismissed these activities as nothing more than laughable child’s play from those wacky Iranians. The news stories have carefully pointed out that the Iranians do not actually have the capability to build their own real aircraft carrier and that no “nuclear propulsion system” has been installed in the “Target Barge”.
We here at The Cassandra Times believe that the media’s attempts to allay the discerning public’s fears of a real Iranian threat fall woefully short of their target and that these activities signal a far more serious threat. The speculation by unnamed analysts as to the purpose or utility of the construct is fairly weak. The analysts mistakenly depict the drop-off in the Iranians’ normal bellicose action in the Gulf as a positive development and dismissingly speculate that the silly construction of the two thirds scale mock-up is intended to be dragged out to sea and blown up as some kind of propaganda stunt.
Our hope here at The Cassandra Times is that these platitudes are merely meant for public consumption just like the rest of the disinformation that the media complex feeds the American public, and that this threat is taken far more seriously at the offices of the intelligence communities where actual threat assessment is done. As usual, we strongly disapprove of of our government treating the American public like mushrooms, namely keeping them in the dark and feeding them fecal matter. Therefore, we will offer our loyal readers a far more pointed and realistic analysis.
A two-thirds scale mock-up of something as large as a Nimitz class carrier is no small feat. To build one that actually floats is a monumental undertaking for any government. If we think of this endeavor in terms of a big-budget Hollywood movie, we should ask ourselves if any movie studio has ever built a two-thirds scale mock-up of an aircraft carrier. Have they done so for even a big budget Hollywood film like “Battleship” or “The Final Countdown”? The answer is no. Mere filmmaking does not require this kind of capital commitment, particularly not with the sophisticated graphics and relatively inexpensive computer power which is commercially available today.
The question then remains: what are the Iranians up to? Judging from the world’s militaries’ traditional use of mock-ups, the Iranians are preparing to attack. In order to increase the likelihood of success of a surprise attack, military forces must train in advance. Whether it was the attack on Pearl Harbor, the assault on Eban Emael during the Blitzkreig, the 1982 bombing of the Libyan strategic assets by the Reagan administration, the Sontay raid on the Hanoi Hilton or the Israeli raid in Entebbe, mock-ups were used to help prepare the attacking forces in advance of battle. This is how war is done, and the Iranians do not have to be geniuses to have learned this lesson.
The fact that Iranian harassment of American forces in the Gulf has been scaled back is really a bad omen, rather than a sign of a suddenly more conciliatory relationship. If a country is planning a large scale attack, it does not normally engage in bellicose activity that will ramp up their enemies’ alertness or state of readiness. Instead, the attacking country will seek to lull its enemies into a state of unpreparedness.
From a geo-political standpoint, the United States is now more unprepared, unable, and irresolute than it has been since the Carter administration was during the Iranian Revolution. All of America’s enemies, including Iran, know that now is the time to strike. President Obama has zero respect amongst our enemies, and is, frankly, a laughingstock.
Whether the American public is capable of recognizing or admitting that Obama administration’s weakness is intentional or not, the rest of the world clearly sees that the consistent thread in all of President Obama’s actions over the course of his term has been to weaken the United States economically, militarily, and diplomatically, just as President Jimmy Carter did nearly forty years ago. President Obama and his closest advisors, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power, and Attorney General Eric Holder, want, as their long-stated goal, the diminution of American power and dominance in the world. Whether or not one politically agrees with the desirability of their aim to elevate the third world and to lower America and other western countries to a level of parity is irrelevant to this particular analysis. What is relevant is that, if America’s enemies and rivals seek the best time to advance their own geo-strategic positions, now is the time to strike. We can see this in Russia’s new assertiveness in Crimea and in the Ukraine.
Turning back to the underlying purpose of Iran’s expensive and detailed mock-up, we should ask ourselves what sort of attack would this setup be useful for? A mere bombing target for attack aircraft or drones would not have to be this elaborate or built to this scale. In fact, the smaller the target, the better practice it would provide by being more difficult to hit with precision bombing than the real thing. Building something to this scale — that actually floats — lends itself to being a practice device for a combined forces attack. Iran needs to be able to coordinate aerial gunnery with waterborne attack craft, and, likely, even boarding operations. The Iranians will want to learn what methods and tools function under real world conditions to “take out” a Nimitz class carrier and they want to hone the skills of the attack force.
The aircraft carrier is the premier power projection platform for American forces in the Persian Gulf region. If the Iranians plan to challenge the United States in the area, they will need to be able to take down an aircraft carrier. This mock-up shows us that they have the intent of doing so, possibly near the next presidential election. They may chose to make their move either before President Obama is out of office, thus, guaranteeing a weak, irresolute American response or shortly after the election before the new president is able to rebuild America’s capabilities.
The remaining questions are how the Iranians plan to conceal the training operations from American satellites, what is the strategic goal they intend to pursue, where they anticipate an American military response that will involve the deployment of a carrier group, and the imminency of their need to take it down. Being that we are talking about the Revolutionary Government of Iran, the takedown of an American carrier may be an end in and of itself, but we should not count on that.
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Iranian Ship, in Plain View but Shrouded in Mystery, Looks Very Familiar to U.S.
By ERIC SCHMITT
MARCH 20, 2014
WASHINGTON — Iran is building a nonworking mock-up of an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that United States officials say may be intended to be blown up for propaganda value.
Intelligence analysts studying satellite photos of Iranian military installations first noticed the vessel rising from the Gachin shipyard, near Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf, last summer. The ship has the same distinctive shape and style of the Navy’s Nimitz-class carriers, as well as the Nimitz’s number 68 neatly painted in white near the bow. Mock aircraft can be seen on the flight deck.
The Iranian mock-up, which American officials described as more like a barge than a warship, has no nuclear propulsion system and is only about two-thirds the length of a typical 1,100-foot-long Navy carrier. Intelligence officials do not believe that Iran is capable of building an actual aircraft carrier.
“Based on our observations, this is not a functioning aircraft carrier; it’s a large barge built to look like an aircraft carrier,” said Cmdr. Jason Salata, a spokesman for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, across the Persian Gulf from Iran. “We’re not sure what Iran hopes to gain by building this. If it is a big propaganda piece, to what end?”
Whatever the purpose, American officials acknowledged on Thursday that they wanted to reveal the existence of the vessel to get out ahead of the Iranians.
Navy and other American intelligence analysts surmise that the vessel, which Fifth Fleet wags have nicknamed the Target Barge, is something that Iran could tow to sea, anchor and blow up — while filming the whole thing to make a propaganda point, if, say, the talks with the Western powers over Iran’s nuclear program go south.
Iran has previously used barges as targets for missile firings during training exercises, filmed the episodes and then televised them on the state-run news media, Navy officials said.
“It is not surprising that Iranian military forces might use a variety of tactics — including military deception tactics — to strategically communicate and possibly demonstrate their resolve in the region,” said an American official who has closely followed the construction of the mock-up.
But while Iran has tried to conceal its underground nuclear-related sites, the Iranian Navy has taken no steps to cloak from prying Western satellites what it is building pierside at the busy shipyard. “The system is often too opaque to understand who hatched this idea, and whether it was endorsed at the highest levels,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Iran has sought to exploit captured or pirated American military technology in the past. Last year, Iran’s political and military elite boasted that their forces had shot down an American intelligence-gathering drone, a remotely piloted Navy vehicle called ScanEagle that they quickly put on display for the Iranian news media.
Navy officials responded that no drones had been shot down by enemy fire, although the Pentagon acknowledged at the time that it had lost a small number of ScanEagles, likely to engine malfunction.
Iranian Navy officials could not be immediately reached for comment as the country prepared to celebrate its New Year festivities on Friday. American intelligence officials cited a photograph taken on Feb. 22 in Bandar Abbas and a brief description in Persian of the vessel on a website for Iran’s Ministry of Industry, Mines and Trade.
For now, Navy analysts and American intelligence officials say they are not unduly concerned about the mock ship. But the fact that the Iranians are building it, presumably for some mysteriously bellicose purposes, contrasts with the fact that the Iranians stepped back from their typically heavy anti-American posture during a recent naval exercise in the gulf.
Until recently, Iranian fast-attack boats have harassed American warships, and the government in Tehran has deployed remotely piloted aircraft that carry surveillance pods and that may someday carry rockets.
With Iran’s multiple political bases of power, the government’s purposes can be hard to decipher. After the temporary nuclear agreement was reached in November between the world powers and the moderate government of Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, it was unclear to American officials whether Iran’s hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps might try to provoke a conflict with the United States Navy to undercut the accord.
The navy of the Revolutionary Guards consists of fast-attack speedboats with high-powered machine guns and torpedoes, and crews that in the past employed guerrilla tactics, including swarming perilously close to American warships.
When the mock-up will take its maiden voyage — if it ever does — is anyone’s guess, analysts said. The vessel is nearing completion, they said, and will presumably be shipped by rail on tracks that run through the shipyard, to its destiny in the Persian Gulf just a few hundred yards away.
A version of this article appears in print on March 21, 2014, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Iranian Ship, in Plain View but Shrouded in Mystery, Looks Very Familiar to U.S.
