Iranian Military Improvements...

So, the news recently is that the Iranians are announcing bold new weapons in their arsenal. The other day it was a 200mph underwater rocket. Not surprisingly, the Russians seem to have been the source.

Now, I don't know the first thing about warfare on the sea. I know enough about air warfare to know that I shouldn't comment too loudly. But the commenters to this blog entry tell me that this "new" Iranian weapon, while a threat, probably isn't the threat that Iran is painting it to be. While a murder/suicide is still a murder, you can't keep it up.

And today we find a story where Iran announces a new airborne threat. But is this really new? Or are the Iranians announcing something that has been around since the mid-60's? Does this photo look anything like this one?

WIG vehicles are not new. They may be new to the Iranians, and they certainly are intriguing to the public, but the fact that they haven't caught on in either military or civilian aviation is telling. While the Iranian super-fast torpedoes, and WIG vehicles are, in a word, laughable, Jane's Tim Ripley makes a wonderful point here which bears repeating...

"You don't actually need lots of weapons to close (the Strait of Hormuz), you just need lots of threats... "You don't even have to sink a ship, you just have to double the insurance rates (for shipping) and it has a knock on effect on the price of oil."