December 25, 2024:
The Persian Gulf state of Qatar has a small navy that currently has four 3,300-ton corvettes, two offshore patrol ships and fourteen fast attack boats, some of them armed with 30mm autocannon or anti-ship missiles. Recently Qatar received Al Fulk, an 8,800-ton amphibious transport dock that carries 440 soldiers and has a crew of 150. Al Fulk is armed with a 76mm rapid fire gun, four 30mm autocannon systems and sixteen VLS cells air defense missiles. This ship also carries three helicopters on its flight deck and stores them in a below deck hangar.
This isn’t the first time an LPD has shown up in the Persian Gulf. In 2009 a Persian Gulf shipyard spent eight weeks working on a 24,000-ton American LPD to make repairs on the hull, fuel tank and ballast tanks. The damage occurred when the ship collided with a submerged American SSN in the narrow Straits of Hormuz. Fifteen sailors aboard the sub were injured, while a fuel tank on the LPD was torn open and 25,000 gallons of fuel oil got into the water. Both vessels returned to port under their own power. The accident happened at 1 AM, local time. The commander of the sub was later relieved of duty. When underwater, a submarine is responsible for avoiding collisions with surface ships.
The Straits of Hormuz, and the Persian Gulf in general, is a busy waterway, and collisions are fairly common, which is the reason there was a large enough dry dock available nearby to make repairs to the New Orleans. The Persian Gulf is 989 kilometers long, and the average depth is 50 meters. A U.S. SSN is about 18 meters from the bottom of the sub to the top of the sail/box like structure on top of the sub. This makes the one or two American SSNs operating in the Gulf yet another navigation hazard. When SSNs are damaged in an area like this, only emergency repairs are made locally. Given the sensitive nature of the technology used in subs, final repairs are done at a yard that can handle classified material.