The Persian Gulf is over 600 miles long. That's from the Straits of Hormuz. There's still a lot of Iran that borders the Gulf of Oman outside of that. To keep a carrier battle group safe from coast-based attacks (small boats and anti-ship cruise missiles) one would need to go several hundred miles further offshore. The maximum tactical range of a loaded F/A-18 is about 1200 miles. Allowing for any appreciable time on target to locate, identify, target, and launch against a target, the practical area of influence for the aircraft is substantially less than half of the Gulf. These limitations also severely restrict the available target set for land targets – the Iranians have, for example, put most of their nuclear weapons infrastructure well inland from the Gulf.
It isn't clear to me if his thoughts bolster my post with a further explanation of the range problem or are intended to explain why we must put our carriers in the Gulf to attack Iran. If the former, thanks. If the latter, he has a point that missions need to be accomplished that can't be done easily from outside of the Gulf. But I still think we need to keep our carriers and expensive Aegis escorts out of the Gulf as we figure out how to achieve them. Either way, some expansion on the subject is useful.
My understanding of the rule of thumb is that combat radius is a third of the range. But the fact that the effective reach of our carrier air wings has gone down since the 1980s when long-range A-6 strike aircraft sank the first Iranian Sahand during the Tanker War of the Iran-Iraq War doesn't lessen my view that we should not put our carriers within range of Iranian swarming boats in the Persian Gulf. We can carry out our missions in the Gulf with less expensive platforms (like the Ponce), aircraft, and drones. Plus we have local allies with ships to patrol their own backyard. And we need minesweepers right there, of course. So I don't say we stay out of the Persian Gulf completely. Heck, this might be a great time to explore auxiliary cruisers.
I'm not quite as against sailing our big carriers within range of shore-based long-range missiles in order to attack those installations since we have missile defenses and the Iranian ability to find and target our carriers won't be that sharp. I wouldn't linger, however. Dash in and out of range. You never can tell whether the Chinese or Russians might pass satellite information on to the Iranians just for the fun of seeing if our carriers can take a punch.
But the larger point of the post was in regard to protecting shipping in the Gulf rather than the problem of striking targets deep in Iran related to the nuclear program. That's a separate problem.
For that we'll have long-range strike bombers. And we'll have land-based aircraft in Gulf states (though they won't admit it). Plus cruise missiles--lots of them. And we can use carrier aircraft, too, even from the Arabian Sea, as long as they have access to Air Force land-based tanker support. Yes, carriers have some ship-based refueling capabilities, but it is fairly limited. During the initial campaign in Afghanistan, at ranges similar to what it would be for inland targets in Iran, Navy aircraft needed lots of tanker support (much of that had to come from land-based Air Force assets):
For their part, strikes from the Navy’s carriers involved distances to target of more than 600 nautical miles, with an average sortie length of more than four and a half hours and a minimum of two inflight refuelings per fighter each way to complete the mission. ... Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) provided Tristar and VC-10 tankers to help supplement Air Force KC-135s and KC-10s in providing inflight refueling for the Navy fighters.
I would not risk our carriers in the constricted waters of the Persian Gulf in a fight with Iran. We have other means to fight Iran and means to utilize carrier aircraft from ranges that minimize the threat to our carriers.
Remember, we invest so much of our psychology of national power in our big carriers that we don't even seem to accept that they can sink. That subject seems forbidden in our planning. So losing one (or even pictures of one burning and sending plumes of black smoke into the sky) might shake our home morale enough to interrupt our campaign to beat Iran--or provide Iran with a symbol of victory even if we successfully complete every objective in a war with Iran. I'd rather use other assets when we can.
