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Comment by metaphorm | Hacker News Reader

these ships can't use the Suez canal in peace-time under the currently negotiated treaties. if they really truly must go through the canal, who's gonna stop them?

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Egypt could scuttle a ship or two if they wanted - at both ends, trapping the fleet inside.

Seems to me that canals make rather sitting targets for warships, at war time at least.

A carrier battle group is more than powerful enough to control both ends of the canal for the duration of the trip, and I seriously doubt that Egypt (or any other country) would want to cripple an economic engine as large as a canal unless they were directly involved in the war in question.

Really? Multiple carrier groups, plus ground contingents from the Army and Marines, plus the Air Force are unable to "control" Iraq or Afghanistan...

I am no military genius, but Iraq and Afghanistan sound larger, more complex, and not as commandable by sea as a typical canal.

Perhaps you are unaware of the events of 1956 when the combined forces of Britain and France failed to hold the Suez Canal?

Perhaps you're unaware of the power that a US Navy carrier group has in 2017 :)

It's all relative, no?

how are you going to stop someone from scuttling a ship? sink it?

> how are you going to stop someone from scuttling a ship? sink it?

Yes. A carrier group is able to project military power for a great distance around itself. Long range missiles, submarines, aircraft, you name it. Presumably it would monitor the canal along its entire length, and destroy anything that approaches by land or sea before it is able to create or become an obstacle.

They can't stop a team in a small boat from boarding a merchantman, positioning it cross-ways in the canal, then sinking it. Do this once at each end, and your carrier group just lost it's mobility and much of it's ability to project force.

Admittedly there are edge cases and military planners like nothing more than dreaming these up and devising countermeasures. The Suez and Panama Canals are not small, so it's not as if all the ships have to crowd together and be trapped in a small area. But yes, there are threats and their probability of success is never 100%.

Here's an interesting lesson from WW2 which shows the danger of previously unknown coastal torpedo batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Drøbak_Sound

Then Egypt has declared war on the United States and is going to have much bigger issues to deal with.

If the US sent in it's fleet when Egypt says no, that's the US declaring war through the act of invading a foreign country.

If you sink it anywhere which isn't directly in front of the canal then the scuttling is a failure, right? A typical anti-ship missile has some 150 km range, seems pretty easy to sink that ship long before it reaches the canal.

>Egypt could scuttle a ship or two if they wanted - at both ends, trapping the fleet inside.

See the Yellow Fleet, trapped in the Suez Canal for 8 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet

Anybody with an anti-ship miss that they can launch from shore. Gary Brecher/War Nerd wrote an article, that I can't find at the moment, about how vulnerable the US Navy is to attack by shore-based missles where the Navy doesn't have a good stand-off distance.

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