Trump: U.S. Is Destroying Iranian Mine Layers With Same Weapon Used Against Caribbean Narco Boats

The U.S. military is taking out large numbers of Iranian small craft, what Tehran euphemistically calls its ‘mosquito fleet’, with the same missile it uses to destroy narco-terrorist drug boats in the Caribbean, President Trump has revealed.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s final public remarks at the NATO summit that finished Wednesday night in Ankara, Turkey, was on the resumption of hostilities with Iran, which as relayed by the President had cynically broken the terms of the Memorandum of Understanding and attacked civilian shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Noting the U.S. military was reacting by striking what remains of Iran’s military equipment, President Trump related that large numbers of small Iranian attack craft were being swatted away.

Iran had a certain quantity of conventional military assets at the beginning of Operation Epic Fury including warships and aircraft, but these were quickly destroyed in the first days of the conflict, leaving Iran’s considerable stockpile of small, unconventional, or asymmetric-warfare systems. Easily hidden underground and reactivated at short notice, this has included Iran’s considerable magazine-depth of missiles but also speedboat-size small craft.

These attack boats, known as Iran’s “mosquito fleet”, are intended to cause havoc in the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf by launching suicide bombing attacks — like manned versions of Ukraine’s one way attack drone boats — or by carrying Chinese-made canisterised anti-ship missiles, or by laying sea mines. Otherwise unarmed, unarmoured, and without electronic countermeasures they are extremely vulnerable to air attack and rely on their numbers for effect.

President Trump stated his forces had swept Iran’s mosquitos from the sea on Tuesday night and would continue to do so on Wednesday. Remarking that Iranians were “evil people” for dropping sea mines into the Gulf, the President said:

…their entire navy is at the bottom of the sea, and now they have little tiny boats. Tiny little boats. And we knocked out 28 of them last night with the same weapon we use with the drug people… we’re using the same thing for the mine boats, and we hit a lot of them last night…

President Trump noted the weapons being used against the small boats are “the same exact missile” as those being used against narco boats attempting to smuggle drugs north to the United States from South America. While the President didn’t specific which missile that is, the chances are good it is either the old Cold War stalwart the AGM-114 Hellfire or the modern budget killer the APKWS.

Created to kill Russian tanks in Central Europe in case the Cold War turned hot in the 1980s, the Hellfire remains an effective anti-armour air-to-ground weapon but both in terms of capability and cost per unit it is overkill for taking out converted speedboats.

As previously reported, the U.S. is now fielding the APKWS in the skies above Iran to close that kill-cost gap. A guidance kit fitted to a 1960s-era rocket — itself a derivative of a basic 1940s design — the APKWS is:

…just fast and powerful enough to easily destroy and disable small unarmoured targets like Iranian Shahed-type suicide drones, and suicide attack fast boats without spending millions of dollars on prestige missiles for the job.

The APKWS is part of a broader trend in weapon design to take older, cheaper, and readily available legacy munitions that are perfectly effective and require no improvement in all regards except their lack of guidance system, and to retrofit one. Keeping as much as the original weapon intact as possible significantly reduces research and development time and cost and makes advantages of deep magazine stocks of otherwise obsolete weapons that many countries still hold over from the Cold War.

One such parallel development is the British Martlet lightweight multirole missile, a guidance kit fitted to a missile that traces its lineage back to the 1960s-era Blowpipe man-portable surface-to-air missile through the Javelin and Starburst. Another is the Joint Direct Attack Munition Extended Range, a bolt-on set of glide wings and a guidance kit fitted to a Korean era air-dropped free-fall gravity bomb that directs the weapon to its intended target with a mix of inertial, GPS, and laser guidance.

Russia has developed its own equivalent, strapping comparatively rustic glide and guide kits to their own surplus of Cold War-era bombs to drop on Ukraine, adding a stand-off distance as great as 37 miles.