Iran’s new terrorist drone aircraft carrier can’t face the US Navy – but could be dangerous

Converted merchantman can bring unmanned fixed-wing planes back aboard

Some time in 2022, Iran began building its first aircraft carrier. Two years later, Shahid Bahman Bagheri is nearing completion. Recent photos reveal important finishing touches to the nearly 800-foot vessel, including an angled flight deck with markings to help guide landing aircraft.
Bagheri is not a proper purpose-built carrier like the US Navy’s thousand-foot supercarriers. Instead, she’s a commercial container ship with modifications that allow her to launch and land small aircraft – almost certainly drones.
And Bagheri doesn’t belong to the Iranian navy. Instead, she’s part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, the IRGCN, as distinct from the regular Iranian navy. The Revolutionary Guards are separate from the conventional armed forces: they are designated as a terrorist organisation by various foreign governments including the US.
The regular navy patrols distant waters with a fleet of submarines and small, aged frigates. The IRGCN with its missiles, swarm speedboats and drones operates mostly in the Persian Gulf – operations that often involve deliberate provocations such as harassing or seizing foreign vessels and shooting down foreign drones in international air space.
So that provocative force is about to get a lot more powerful – with a seagoing platform that can extend the range of Iran’s own drones, including reusable surveillance and attack drones and single-use “kamikaze” attack drones.
Bagheri is a crude vessel. Where big navies build carriers from the keel up with angled flight decks so as to optimise flight operations, the IRGCN angled Bagheri’s flight deck because it had no other choice.
That’s because, as a converted container ship, Bagheri has a bulky superstructure that stretches the entire width of the hull near the stern. A proper carrier has one or more small superstructure “islands” set to one side, meaning that planes can come in to land over the stern – but this is impossible for aircraft landing on the Bagheri. To maximize the length of the flattop’s flight deck, the vessel’s designers had no choice but to angle the deck around the superstructure – an improvisation that required them to awkwardly extend the deck over the port side of the ship. 
In other words, Bagheri’s angled deck doesn’t do what the angled decks do on a US Navy carrier: boost the pace at which the ship can launch and land aircraft. Even with its angled deck, Bagheri is a one-plane-at-a-time kind of carrier: its angled runway, unlike that of a US carrier, is used both for landing and for launch. It has a “ski-jump” ramp at the bow, allowing fixed-wing craft to get airborne with heavier loads.
What kinds of drones the IRGC might fly from Bagheri remains to be seen: its air group will probably include some rotary-wing craft, possibly manned ones, but the angled runway is clearly meant for fixed-wing types. Both the regular Iranian navy and IRGCN also operate converted commercial ships with smaller, square flight decks that are optimized for manned helicopters, rotary-wing drones and catapult-launched kamikaze drones.
Bagheri’s design indicates that her air group will probably be mainly re-usable, intended to return to the ship between missions. She might well be mainly a Shahed-129 carrier. The 26-foot-long, propeller-driven Shahed-129 is one of Iran’s best drones, able to carry sensors and small guided munitions as far as a thousand miles. 
While a Shahed-129 doesn’t necessarily need a carrier to range the length and breadth of the Persian Gulf, deploying from a ship at sea could extend its reach over neighboring countries and into the Gulf of Oman – or farther. If Tehran expands the IRGCN’s remit to include provocations farther from Iranian shores, Bagheri and a wing of Shahed-129s could lead the way.
Expect to see a lot of Bagheri and her drones in the near future. Don’t expect to see Bagheri with bigger manned planes, however. The improvised carrier doesn’t have a catapult for launching big planes. Nor does she have arrestor wires for recovering them. 
A vertical-landing jump jet in the class of the Lockheed Martin F-35B doesn’t need a catapult or arrestor wires, of course. F-35Bs operate – or will operate – from no-catapult ships in the navies of Britain, Japan and Italy. They’re also operated by the US Marines from no-catapult US amphibious ships. But Iran doesn’t have any jump jets – and only the United States builds them. So it’s pretty much certain that the Bagheri won’t get manned jets.
But real wars underway in the Black and Red Seas have shown that drones are only growing in importance. Bagheri will be a significant player in the conflicts of tomorrow.