An Iranian warship sailing the deep waters of the Indian Ocean should set alarm bells ringing. The IRGC Navy (NEDSA) completed a pioneering long-range cruise in May, claiming to have passed waters near the US military base at Diego Garcia and beyond during 39 days at sea. Long-range deployments have previously been undertaken by the conventional Iranian Navy (NEDAJA), while NEDSA – as an arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – is allied with the aggressive regional expansionism program that within the Iranian state is driven by the IRGC.
The NEDSA deployment was led by the 36,000-tonne Shahid Mahdavi, formerly a Korean-built Panamax container ship. Conversion of the ship to a naval role was carried out in the southern Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas and completed early in 2023. The Shahid Mahdavi can steam at almost 18 nautical miles per hour (roughly 33 kilometres per hour) and sail up to 33,000 kilometres without the need to bunker.
During its sea trials, the Shahid Mahdavi was seen operating Mi-17 helicopters from its 150-metre flat deck. It is defended by four integral vertical-launch Nawab short-range multi-target air defence missiles and by anti-aircraft gun systems. It has an Iranian-designed three-dimensional phased array radar capable of identifying ship, aircraft and missile targets out to 200 kilometres. Additional air defence systems can be operated from the flat deck of the ship, as spotted when the Shahid Mahdavi deployed for the first time to the Gulf of Aden in May 2023.
In conventional operations, the Shahid Mahdavi would be very vulnerable. But in conditions less than open warfare, the domain in which the IRGC specialises, the Shahid Mahdavi could sail in silent mode, relying on inertial navigation systems and passive reception of satellite signals to receive intelligence and targeting information. Staying undetected could be harder than NEDSA might imagine, but given the long range of some of the offensive systems that the ship could employ, there would be a large sea area in which the ship could hide, if its aim was to launch a covert, unattributable attack.
The flat deck of the Shahid Mahdavi is a flexible resource. It has been used as a platform for Qadr-474 cruise missiles, which have a range up to 2000 kilometres, and could easily be used to launch 2500-kilometre range Shahed 136 drone, the type provided in large numbers to Russia for its war in Ukraine. In February, the Iranian news agency Tasnim showed video of two containerised missiles being fired from the deck of the Shahid Mahdavi at sea in the Gulf of Oman, likely to be advanced Zolfaghar Basir anti-ship ballistic missiles with a range of 1000 kilometres.
The flat deck of the Shahid Mahdavi can also be used to deploy NEDSA fast attack boats. Variants of these vessels are themselves equipped with anti-aircraft and Nasir CM-90 autonomously targeting anti-shipping missiles. The NEDSA fleet of such boats includes Zulfikar submersible torpedo boats, capable of about 80-kilometres per hour on the surface, but able to loiter, fire torpedoes from snorkel depth, and to cruise for short distances underwater.
The Admiral’s declaration should probably be taken at face value, and NEDSA’s ships could well appear “behind the lines” without warning.
The Shahid Mahdavi set off with this integral capability on its 39-day cruise through the central Indian Ocean, from which it returned to Bandar Abbas on 18 May. Rear Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, the NEDSA commander, claimed that the Shahid Mahdavi, as flagship of what he described as the 5th Martyr Qassem Soleimani Flotilla, had transited in the area of “American forces stationed on Diego Garcia”, crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, and passed through the Strait of Malacca. The Admiral claimed the ship sailed through both the areas designated to the US 5th and 7th Fleet. With these waypoints, the deployment could have taken the ship past Australian territories at Cocos and Christmas Islands, as well as Singapore. No sightings or port calls were announced or reported in the press.
Tangsiri gave notice last year that the Shahid Mahdavi and its sister ship Shahid Bagheri would undertake such long-rang cruises. When welcoming the Shahid Mahdavi home he warned that “our oceangoing warships can be present in every location across the world, and when we can fire missiles from them, there is accordingly no safe spot for anyone intending to create insecurity for us.” The Admiral’s declaration should probably be taken at face value, and NEDSA’s ships could well appear “behind the lines” without warning. In this context, the IRGC has a proven record of initiating armed provocations, calibrated to be just below the threshold requiring an immediate response, but which over time are ramped up in an escalatory and incremental manner.
Iran has a new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist elected in the wake of the death of hardliner Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash. But Pezeshkian is unlikely to weaken the expansionist ambitions of the IRGC, who answer to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. This view was supported recently by US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.
The past record of reformist presidents suggests that a conciliatory face will be presented to those likely to respond, to achieve goals such as a liberalisation of the sanctions regime, while hardliners and the IRGC continue the program of regional expansionism in an uncompromising manner. Expect the Shahid Mahdavi or the Shahid Bagheri as tokens of this policy to appear on the horizon sometime soon.
