The Navy accompanied four U.S.-flagged commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz Thursday, in a new policy the Defense Department said it will continue as long as necessary to guarantee safe passage for U.S. ships.
All four of Thursday’s ships were U.S. government-contracted container ships or were part of the U.S. Military Sealift Command. But the new policy applies to any U.S. “ship that desires that support,” said U.S. Central Command spokesman Col. Pat Ryder.
The Navy started the escorts after the Marshall Islands-flagged Maersk Tigris container ship was intercepted by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy vessels this week. When the Tigris did not comply with Iranian demands to further enter its waters, the ships fired warning shots across the Tigris’s bow. Since then, the Tigris has been anchored and detained, in what Iran says is a financial dispute with the carrier.
But the U.S. Navy, which has had the destroyer USS Farragut and three coastal patrol ships — the USS Thunderbolt, USS Firebolt and USS Typhoon — monitoring the Tigris from about 60 nautical miles away since the incident, decided to take no chances with Iran’s apparent increase in provocative behavior in the Strait, and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter approved offering protection to all future U.S. transits.
“This is in response to the Tigris,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said.
The Strait is a narrow, strategically critical oil export waterway that is traversed annually by tens of thousands of commercial vessels. At its narrowest point, it is only 22 nautical miles across — important because both Iran, which forms its north coast line, and Oman, which borders to the South, both can claim up to 12 nautical miles as their territorial seas.
The safe passage of vessels through the Strait is guided by international treaty. However, the most recent treaty, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, was not ratified by either the U.S. or Iran.
