Catsoo
True; I don't know if the Ghadirs are intended to serve in the Persian Gulf though. The whole deconfliction of resources that occurred between the IRGCN and IRIN would be for naught if the two had overlapping service areas. Alternately, maybe the IRGCN's lack of a sub-surface capability will result in the IRIN 'loaning' a few subs to the Persian Gulf. But even if the IRIN's submarines aren't used exclusively outside of the Gulf, I still feel relatively safe saying that the majority of their use would still probably occur there since that's where we've seen the IRIN building up infrastructure, and doing most of their training (limited to what we have seen of course).
Granted, the Gulf of Oman is still littoral but the once you get out into the North Indian Ocean it's pretty open.
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Here's a relevant passage from the Open Source Intelligence Project concerning the signature of the Ghadir.
Sound damping is probably poor on these subs due to their small size the sound rafting of heavy equipment and even entire decks found on larger submarines would be impractical. However if the sub was bottomed with most equipment shut down its small size would make detection difficult. The small size also limits patrol time since their appears to be little space for crew necessities such as a galley or bunks.
I included the last line because it indirectly relates to visibility. Returning to Bandar-e Abbas/Jask/Behesheti to rearm, refuel, or cycle crews doesn't just affect the time-on-station, it also means that the Ghadir is going to be spending more time traveling noisily between points A and B, and more time spent surfaced next to a very visible pier. This raises questions of what kind of infrastructure is actually required to service these vessels; could they simply pull up to a floating dock, switch crews with a small-boat, and run diesel in from a couple drums sitting on the dock, and then disappear back into the Gulf of Oman?
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From what I've been reading so far, it seems as though the US anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capability, although in an overall decline following the end of the cold war, has been experiencing a minor renaissance as the focus turns away from large blue-water engagements with SSBNs towards littoral engagements in the same way that land warfare has gradually shifted towards low-intensity engagements.
As far as I can tell, USN ASW grand-strategy is a two pronged approach aimed at creating a secure operating zone while retaining the ability to destroy submarines outside of this zone. What this boils down to is creating an exclusion zone in the Gulf of Oman where carrier groups can launch interdiction strikes from without fear of torpedoes. You can actually see this in the other thread that talks about U.S. strategy for "retaking the gulf" (I'm skeptical of the quality of information, but nonetheless) which details the use of special operations forces to clear the coast of Oman of it's naval support capability.
The focus is on net-centric warfare which involves a lot of jargon like 'agility', 'sensor-rich', 'persistant-detection', but once you get past the buzz-words the central theory is very good for the reason that it's fundamentally predicated on reducing the OODA loop (observe-orient-decide-act), and squashing hierarchies is a very good way to do this. When you examine all of the U.S. attempts to track enemy weapon systems - whether they be Iranian HY-2s during the Iran-Iraq war, Serbian SAMs, or Iraqi SCUDs - the success or failure is always predicated on the ability to detect it in the first place (observe), classify it as a target or any other number of things (orient), and fuse this information together into a response (decide), all within as short a time period as possible.
Take the example of the Iran-Iraq war: the U.S. couldn't track Iran's HY-2s along the coast because they didn't have what the navy is now calling 'pervasive awareness'. This failure eventually resulted in Operation Nimble Archer because the preferred means of retaliation for the ASCM attack on Kuwait was an attack on the launchers themselves. Likewise, the confusion that led to the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 was ultimately the result of a breakdown in the OODA loop.
Topic: More details about "Fateh" and "Besat" Submarines (Read 2400 times)