Iran Update: Mines!
By 
Iran has begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf channel that carries 20 percent of the world’s oil, according to U.S. officials, an effort that could further complicate American efforts to restart shipping there.
While the U.S. military said it had destroyed larger Iranian naval vessels that could be used to quickly lay mines in the strait, Iran began using smaller boats for the operation on Thursday, according to a U.S. official briefed on the intelligence.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps can deploy hundreds, even thousands, of the small boats, which the Iranian force has long used to harass larger ships, including the U.S. Navy’s.
Explainer on how they work. Strategically there are lots of options, few good ones.
In the past American commanders have insisted that they could reopen the Strait of Hormuz within days or weeks of Iran attempting to close it. But experts point to the cautionary tale of Britain’s failed campaign against the Ottomans in the first world war to force open the Dardenelles, part of the passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The allies lost several ships trying to fight their way in from the sea. The Gallipoli landings to seize the passage by land turned out to be an even bloodier debacle.
Iran, too, has layered defences and commanding terrain in the Strait of Hormuz, notes Jonathan Schroden of the Centre for Naval Analyses, another American think-tank. “You have to peel the layers of the onion,” he says. “You would first have to tackle the missiles and the drones and the fast boats before you would go after the mines.” Minesweepers are poorly protected and would struggle to operate under fire. America is replacing wooden-hulled minesweepers with littoral-combat ships carrying mine-warfare “packages”, including unmanned drones, though some worry these are unproven.
I don’t quite know what to make of the story that nobody planned for the Straits to be closed… it is not true in a literal sense because it is literally the case that the Pentagon has been planning around the possibility of Iran closing the straits for forty-seven years. Which is to say that the failure of anticipation here must have happened at the political level, which tells us some awfully bad things about the planning and strategic evaluation process in the Trump administration.
Anyway it’s only March 13 and I’ve run out of gift links for you sorry SOBs. Other stuff:
- Some of the tools available to Iran
- KC-135 crash over Iraq. Losing one of these is not a problem; losing more will cause serious issues.
- The guy whose entire family we killed seems upset.
- Could be some time before USN vessels are able to escort ships through the Straits.
- The USN does have several littoral combat ships specialized for mine warfare on hand.
- War is God’s way of teaching Americans about the maritime insurance market.