A river navy or river fleet (in English:Brown-water navy) is a maritime terminology designating a navy assigned to the defense of rivers.
An American concept, it is to be differentiated from the littoral navy and the high seas navy (capable of operating more than 200 nautical miles/370 kilometers from the coast on open oceans).
Attributes of a river navy
They are based above all on the use of gunboats and patrol boats, light vessels adapted to navigation on rivers and lakes. A fluvial navy does not necessarily imply a lack of offensive capabilities, as some ships are indeed equipped with anti-ship missiles (see Missile Boat).
History and use of the term
River navies have existed since antiquity, but the term brown-water navy originated in the Civil War (1861-1865) in the United States to designate the gunboats and iron-hulled battleships of the Union Navy operating on the Mississippi in order to blockade the ports of the Confederacy and thus cut their territory in two.
The European colonial empires also had gunboats to monitor the rivers of Africa and East Asia, such as the Tonkin flotilla.
It was then reused during the Indochina War (Dinassault of the National Navy, operating in the waters of the Mekong and the Red River from 1947 to 1955) then during the Vietnam War on November 18, 1965, when the United States Navy formalizes its river navy (Mobile Riverine Force) with the appearance of Patrol Boat, Rivers (en) (PBR), patrol boats intended to patrol the rivers of Vietnam, in service from March 1966 until the end of 1971. In 1970 , the riverine units of the US Navy are transferred to the ARVN, within the framework of the American policy of “Vietnamization. »
After Vietnam, units of the Brown Water Navy took the name of Special Boat Squadrons and were engaged in the Gulf War in 1991 and in anti-drug operations in Colombia.
Between 2006 and 2008, following the Iraq war and given the need to control the Euphrates and the Iraqi marshes, three riverine marine units called Riverine Squadron were recreated by the United States Navy. One of them becoming a Coastal Riverine Squadron in 2012. This Coastal Riverine Force had a strength of 4,400 in 2012.
The French Navy disbanded its last riverine unit, the Forces Maritimes du Rhin, in 1966.
Several countries that are landlocked or have a river border or an inland sea have river formations, such as the Bolivian naval forces or in Russia, the Amur flotilla stationed in Khabarovsk on the river of the same name of the Russian fleet of the Pacific and the Caspian Flotilla in Astrakhan.