Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, commander of the US 5th Fleet based in Bahrain, told Reuters that the Navy would respond with force if a situation required it, but had careful controls in place to prevent a misunderstanding escalating into a crisis.
“We would hope that nobody would think it would be a good idea to create a circumstance that might be interpreted as a provocation, or even intended to elicit a response, an actual provocation,” Cosgriff said in an interview in Dubai.
“Our approach is going to be measured,” he said, adding that his ships would not allow themselves to be provoked but would defend themselves.
He said captains and crews of US vessels were trained to respond to provocations “with discipline, with restraint, with professionalism”, and were able to be in immediate contact with headquarters when faced with a perceived threat.
In January, the United States said five small Iranian speedboats aggressively approached three US Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping route for Gulf oil. During the confrontation, a radio message was received with a male voice saying: “You will explode after … minutes.”
Tehran said the encounter was normal and that its boats were just trying to identify the US vessels.
Some regional maritime experts say the threatening message may have come not from the Iranian vessels but from a radio heckler dubbed the “Filipino monkey” who for years has interrupted Gulf radio communications with insults and chatter.
Cosgriff said he had never attributed the message to the Iranians and had no new information on where it came from.
“But I do know when it did occur in the sequence of events, and that’s what contributed in the totality of events (to) getting my attention very quickly that this was something out of the ordinary and unnecessary,” he said.
“The conduct of the captain and crews of those ships was exactly as I would have liked,” he said. “It was disciplined, it was restrained, they didn’t allow themselves to be provoked, and we had a positive outcome.”
Cosgriff said that since the January incident, “there has been a return to a more normal set of circumstances”.
He said he was aware of reports that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps — seen by Washington as a terrorist organisation — had taken over responsibility for patrolling Gulf waters and the Strait of Hormuz from the Iranian navy, but that this had not fundamentally changed the situation.
Asked about the Navy’s role in preventing material reaching Iran that could be used to create nuclear weapons, he said: “We are deeply concerned about the transfer of weapons of mass destruction around the world and the proliferation of that sort of capability.”
Western powers have demanded Iran ends its nuclear programme. Tehran insists it is not trying to build weapons.
