In a throwback to the 1980s, the Strait of Hormuz is in the news again. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow passage in the Middle East, south of Iran, and between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Most of the Middle Eastern oil and liquefied natural gas goes through this 20-mile gap, making it easy for one bad actor to boost oil prices.
The strait is not totally closed. Rather, the risk that Iran might attack ships led Lloyd’s of London to change its insurance policy. Most oil tankers are not getting insured and will not sail without insurance. There have been a few safe passages, as well as some ships attacked by drones.
There are three main ways to attack tankers: sea mines, anti-ship missiles, and drones. The first two do not seem to be a problem currently. As far as we know, Iran does not seem to have significantly mined the Strait, and it likely would not because Iran’s own economy depends on exporting oil through the Strait of Hormuz, and mining it would be suicidal. The U.S. Navy is taking preemptive measures, such as sinking Iran’s mining boats, anyway. Iran also does not have many antiship missiles. Drones are the problem here, which Iran has used to attack ships. This has led some hack journalists to say that President Donald Trump was not expecting this and has no strategy to reopen the strait. Both claims are easily proven wrong.
First, unlike these journalists, Trump was not born yesterday. He remembers when the strait was closed during the Iran-Iraq War, and Ronald Reagan had to reopen it by force. He tweeted many times during the Obama administration warning that Iran could close the strait. During his first term, he talked about having a plan to reopen it if Iran closed it. And even if he had not thought about this possibility, the military would have warned him about it first.
Which brings me to the second point. Admiral Brad Cooper is the commander of Central Command, the highest ranking officer in charge of the war. Cooper’s previous assignment was commanding the Fifth Fleet, the U.S. Navy unit in the Middle East, including the Persian Gulf. The Fifth Fleet commander’s most important task is ensuring the safe transit of oil from the Persian Gulf. Which is to say, Cooper woke up every day for four years thinking about keeping the Strait of Hormuz open. The journalists and pundits who say that we did not expect this or do not have a plan to reopen it are either fools or liars.
So, what is the plan? In the 1980s, Reagan ordered the U.S. Navy to escort tankers and sank half of Iran’s navy to get the ayatollah to stop. Trump has already attacked Iran much more than Reagan ever did. As I mentioned, the primary threat right now is drones. We don’t have anti-drone defense systems, a problem that predates Trump. Ukraine has developed really good anti-drone technology, which is quite cheap, but we were too proud to ask Ukraine for help for the past several years. Iran has thousands of drones that can swarm ships. This makes escorting them very difficult.
The strategy is to degrade Iran’s drone capabilities to a point where they have too few to swarm tankers, and then the U.S. Navy will start escorting ships. This means attacking Iran’s depots to destroy their drones and killing their drone operatives—it takes a long time to train someone to pilot a drone, and without a pilot a drone is useless. If you look at the interactive map created by the Institute for the Study of War, you will see that attacks in southern Iran, where most of these drones are kept, have significantly increased over the past week. Once the U.S. military is confident that Iran can no longer swarm tankers and that it can intercept drone launches because of their low numbers, it will begin escorting shipping.