The US Navy and security partners are to patrol Middle East waters with 100 uncrewed vessels next year to improve deterrence against attacks, like those presented by Iran, the US Fifth Fleet commander said on Monday.
The region is vital for global trade, especially oil supplies that flow out of the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz.
There have been high-seas confrontations between US and Iranian forces with attacks on oil tankers in Persian Gulf waters in 2019. Sanctions-hit Iran denied accusations of responsibility.
Last year, the US Navy established a new task force to integrate drone systems and artificial intelligence (AI) into the maritime operations of its Bahrain-stationed Fifth Fleet.
“We are at the cusp of an unmanned technological revolution,” US Navy Vice Admiral Brad Cooper told a defense exhibition in Abu Dhabi, where he unveiled proposed plans for the joint fleet.
“By the summer of next year, 100 advanced unmanned surface vessels would be patrolling the waters around this region,” he added.
Cooper said that the US would join with Middle East allies whose forces have uncrewed vessel capabilities to operate much of the new fleet — boosting deterrence and threat detection, and better securing critical waterways.
Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which established diplomatic ties in 2020 and work closely with Washington on regional security, have developed indigenous uncrewed assets.
“No navy acting alone can protect against all the threats here in this region. The region is simply too big. We must address this in a coordinated multinational way,” Cooper said.
Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement, which is fighting a Saudi Arabian-led military coalition, and has carried out mostly failed drone and missile strikes on the UAE, has also targeted vessels off the Yemeni coast.
“It’s well established that Iran is the principal security threat in the region,” Cooper said.
The Fifth Fleet has used uncrewed vessels in exercises since November, racking up thousands of operating hours, he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
RSS